Biotechnology Parks/Clusters: Best Practices and Future Trends

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] laughs [Music] ladies and gentlemen we'll start shortly please be seated thank you [Music] ladies and gentlemen we'll start in two minutes please take your seats thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] sometimes foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] better [Music] welcome back esteemed guests now we'll be diving into the topic of biotechnology parks and Innovation clusters shedding light on the best practices future Trends and different models of biotechnology Parks from around the world to start this session it's my pleasure to welcome the chairman of the session Dr Abdul Ali howdy head of r d strategy and business managing director of medical biotechnology Park KSA and device chairman of the Riyadh Global Medical biotechnology Summit 2021 welcome Dr Abdul Ali the stage is yours foreign [Music] good morning good afternoon and good evening to all of you from around the globe whatever time it is whatever country you're from my understanding is that there are over a hundred thousand people registered in this Summit from over 150 countries so let's enjoy the Riyadh Global Summit for medical biotechnology 2021 it is truly a special privilege for me to share this session with my colleague and friend Dr Klaus Kleinfeld who will join us briefly um online but also I have with me here my distinguished colleagues and uh leading figures in medical biotechnology here in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and I would like to welcome Dr Mana lamery the leading our medical genetics and developmental medicine research at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center Dr Mana please and also she's quite a bright um colleague to have as she actually extended her expertise also Beyond just the genetics and and genomics but also leading the um entrepreneurship and innovation in our institution in addition to Leading one of the satellite centers for Saudi Genome Project a truly vital and strategic project for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and also with me here in Riyadh my distinguished colleague and friend Dr Mahmoud Khan he's a truly a leading figure in the industry and he has quite an impressive number of positions that he has held around the globe from a president of r d at epsico to Chief scientific officer and president of Takeda Pharmaceuticals as you all know one of the global really companies and in addition to number of other achievements and high level really positions around the world of course if I take the time to go through the value of each one of my esteemed guests I think we will spend the next hour just introducing them so so with Dr manal Dr Mahmoud and myself here in Riyadh we will connect or we are connecting now with four other members from this session um again my my dear friend Klaus who I'm sure he's still suffering he has something in his arm because I was putting him so strongly to join me in this session so I might have left some bruises in his arm hopefully he has healed by now and also Dr horse damndi who is the executive director of the biotechnology park at Munich or biom he has extensive also experience in biotechnology of the last 25 years and he continues to lead a thriving biotechnology cluster for of over 400 companies in different areas of medical biotechnology I wanted also to say about Dr Klaus that in addition to number of senior executive positions he has held over the last couple of decades and more um as as the president of Siemens but also and this is very directly relevant to this country as the founding CEO of neon one of the truly strategic and quite unique project for the country in addition in this distinguished parallels we have with us also Mr Walter Klum which I am sure you have heard with him from him briefly at the beginning as he introduced our distinguished keynote speaker today his an entrepreneur uh is extremely successful business leader he has led established a number of Biotech companies around the globe sharing number of boards for other biotech companies and extremely really engaged on how to build biotechnology Enterprises around the globe who else do we have I'm sure we have another person also with us in the uh in this esteemed a group of um of of panel members as soon as they join us so um let me just take a couple of minutes before we start going through individual presentation of each one of our uh of the members of our panel um the Riyadh Global Summit for medical biotechnology 2021 did not come simply as an interest to bring people together and talk about medical biotechnology and learn something about development well that by itself of course is relevant it's important but it's not necessarily just a random event that we organize it comes as a continuation of a national Vision on how to diversify the economy of this country at the heart of that vision is knowledge-based economy if you look at that technology development Innovation r d and in different sectors of course including medical biotechnology plays a vital role so when you look at also the the program of our of our event uh there are nine sessions the choice of these sessions look at them is like making the starting the whole journey of building a strategy how to build a strategy for successful medical biotechnology how to build infrastructure for successful medical biotechnology and what area or what does it take to have um successful vibrant manufacturing plants in number of areas that are relevant to the country including but not limited to for instance vaccine development a number of Biotherapeutics Diagnostics as a focus area but also the science behind it at the end really what will make us successful is the quality for ourselves so now this whole Continuum is really present or will be presented through these different sessions some of the science in for instance um on on genetics and and genomics like will be emphasized through Dr manalamri stem cellular therapy gene therapy Gene editing vaccine development the science of vaccines all of those were put together in order to to make sure that we tackled medical biotechnology from most of its angles at the end the outcome will be hopefully that one of the main outcome will be that we manage we succeed in establishing strategic Global Partnerships with a number of stakeholders from the country and international Global Partners this is for this year hopefully next year or in next two years we'll come back to you and we will share with you some of the new development and how some of this project are taken off so without any further delay I will now pass it to my distinguished colleague Dr Klaus Kleinfeld thank you all right hello good afternoon good morning this is truly as you said a global event I am my arm by the way has magically healed after I had a chance to talk to this in the panel members you know so and so and I think it has more range now than it had before so something magically is happening here on the biotech side so I'm looking forward to hearing from all the experts you know and and learning how we can come much more successful also in the Kingdom I know from my own experience that there is a very very good foundation very lots of very well educated and eager people and a great market and so I think with this Dr Abdullahi I think we'll hand it over to horse right to start start us off absolutely okay I'm happy to do so good afternoon everybody or good morning or good evening wherever you are in the world it's my great pleasure to give you a short introduction about the development and current status of the Munich biotech cluster which happened to a company in the past 24 years or so so uh it's it's an adventure where the goal was to turn signs into Innovation to make from basic research Innovative products that's the goal at least in the field of medical biotechnology now um Munich is a is a it's a very good basis and a very good uh ground for starting such an adventure because we have a fantastic uh life science research landscape uh with our two Munich universities maximilians University and Technical University both have very good University Hospitals we have several Max Planck institutes three are in the area of biological sciences Max Bank Institute for biochemistry for neurobiology and for Psychiatry we have fraunhofer institutes we have a very big and very successful helmhold Center for environmental health and also the so six centers of German centers for health health research that's a very recent initiative of the German government now this form to basis really to create the Munich biotech cluster which has developed over the past years perhaps well you don't have to look to the the very left but this was actually the starting point with introducing genetic engineering Gene technology in the academic area that started with the so-called uh Munich Gene sent in 84 but then in 89 the first biotech company was founded it's still in existence and it's doing very well a diagnostic company and then the companies developed over the years and I would just like to come to the to another very important example because we as a cluster management organization we were really able to develop the cluster into a into a Direction Where We thought it will be successful and this was the so-called Leading Edge cluster competition which took place in Germany uh in 2008 9 and 10 and we participated in this competition and they're what we did and I think that's a very important clue we combined all the uh let's say the resources we have in Munich we took for example uh science in Munich we took uh biotech and Pharma industry in Munich the hospitals in Munich and connected it with a successful cluster Management in Munich it was 50 reasons around 50 research institutes 50 companies and we formed this cluster m to the power of four and uh in this way we received money from the federal government uh more than no exactly 40 million actually more than 40 million came from the local industry and and the state of Bavaria also started to engage itself as well and in this way we could start around 100 million euro program on personalized medicine which really turned the whole region whereas no companies really had thought too much about the medicine of the future of of let's say personalized medicine or Precision medicine it was switched on through this wonderful contest that that we could have there and then in the in the last years also the class developed all together we have now close to 250 biotech companies the rest of the other companies are sitting in other parts of of [Music] um Bavaria it was just the number 150 mention but these are let's say also a lot of service companies which are not are not mentioned here so it was a really successful development that we could have over the past years and it really was a nice Adventure that I I could uh join uh here in a nutshell you see the results of our activities in the past years so we have as a basis top academic uh science at the two universities the two University Hospitals the Max Planck institutes and the helmhot center and biotech companies in the Year 1997 when our oh I forgot that most important part I forgot in 1997 our our cluster management and development organization was founded by your M standing for biotechnology in Munich and also for a small village let's say where the German biotech where the center of where you can find the center of the German Biotech Industry which is a small village of Martin Street so that's where the name stands for and in those days in 1997 we reached we had 30 biotech companies and now it's more than 240 the number of employees Rose from Two and a Half thousand to more than sixteen thousand in those days of course we did not have any clinical trials ongoing now it's more than 130 and that also developed some interesting new uh medical treatment new drugs now in the meantime in the past years 12 trucks have reached the market I will show them on the next slide all this was possible because there were more than 5 billion euros of private investments into the small and medium-sized Enterprises and there was a strong support of the mainly of the Bavarian government which invested more than 2 billion euros into the infrastructure and all that was was done with the support of our cluster organization biom since the year 1997. on the next slide just to prove that our companies are small and medium we I don't talk about the Pharma companies which we have here but I talk about the newly founded biotech companies they were able to to to to to develop all these drugs that you can see here on this list and they are already also two Blockbusters on this list which are highlighted here which is splint Saito a drug that had been developed a so-called T Cell by specific T-cell engager developed by the small and medium-sized Enterprise micromet that was later on acquired by mgen for 1.2 billion dollars and the other one is a drug which came from the company some more forces which is the flagship of our region now we do not only let's say have these kind of drug these developed drugs but there is of course a lot of ongoing research and developments and in the meantime the cluster has focused not only on personalized medicine or Precision medicine but it's a so-called P4 medicine which also is specially includes prevention and prediction and and let's say the active party participation of the patients which are involved in that next to to the focus of personalized medicine I already talked about the drug development which is very strong in our area 12 trucks on the market 100 drug candidates in clinical trials and what makes the region also very interesting and successful are these so-called advanced therapy medical products atmps which are really sophisticated new ways to to treat patients these are for example Sheen Gene therapy trials these are cell therapy trials and others and well the number of companies is not so strong in that not not big in that but I think this is a process which is just ongoing which has just started a couple of years ago and I think we can expect a lot of exciting results a lot of exciting new drugs which might come from from this part of our research and development activities last but not least to mention diagnostic development which was especially important here in the in the ongoing still unfortunately still ongoing pandemic a couple of our companies were really possible to develop a very fast very rapid test systems where you can through a PCR a very rapid PCR system for example detect a virus infection already after 15 minutes and these uh these kind of tests all have already reached the market now all these products which have been developed in the past and have been in many cases developed in collaboration also with the international Pharma industry you see there are many many connections from me I think we have not left out any other any Pharma company worldwide and let's say at least those Pharma companies then can be used to to to Market and sell the drugs that have been developed in our region so it's more or less the the entire northern part of our hemisphere which is covered here with all these corporations that we have now all this was possible through the strong support of our cluster organization and uh here I've listed you the most important points that what we are doing uh to support our cluster to develop our cluster well the first point is we help to create companies and for that purpose we have started uh our so-called inq lab inqlab is an a virtual incubator for the medicine of the future I cannot go into all the details that are listed here but I think some of the most important points here for example that every other year a so-called award our amp to the power of four award resulting from our Leading Edge cluster success is given to uh let's say some some outstanding research teams with outstanding research projects which have a chance to with this uh rather small support only half a million euro can develop their technology to a point where a new company can be started and this program has been very successful let's say 50 of the finance uh research teams indeed have started a company that most of them have been also financed by venture capital and other ways there are other means let's say the startup coaching where we where we support uh the scientists in their ideas and the most difficult part of course is how to turn a scientist into an entrepreneur um how how how to change his or her mind that he thinks of these possibilities to start a company to leave the academic arena and to become a real entrepreneur fortunately let's let's save the environment in Germany is pretty well that you can do that that you can leave University and start such a company and you just have to get the money eventually to do that which is a little bit more difficult if you have failed then you should have a chance to go back to to your academic position but that is not has not been worked out well in the past yet now let me come to the other points that I have here still it's not only the creation of companies I think our our organization coached and trained and supported more than 200 startup teams in about hundreds of them and hundreds of them it could be realized that they started a company we help also those companies to get funding beat up funding grants I already talked about this cluster contest and we had more of them or but more important to to receive Equity from Venture Capital firms family offices Etc there we can offer our support we can offer our Network we also have special events for doing that we help in the business development of the companies when they want for example really to start a trade sale we are talking to Pharma companies we are helping them to find the right Boutique Bank to help them in their job Etc most important I think is the networking of the companies that they really talk to each other and we have built up such a strong Network which is and at the moment is a little bit difficult I have to admit and that's also the main difficulty at the at the moment that these companies get together and last but not least we help the companies to grow there we have also developed a number of different tools to support important as as we all can imagine let's say all these developments are continuing they're going into New Direction and one of the most important direction is of course a digitalization and for that purpose we started a couple of years ago I think in 2018 was the official start point a project digimate Bavaria here in the German name and here we we're trying to introduce it's not we we are just coordinating the project but let's say it's our academic Partners trying to introduce digital methods into treatments and of course we are doing genome research transcriptome research proteom research Etc so this is a nice project which has been funded by the state of Bavaria with 23 million euros and it's mainly run by the German Heart Center here in Munich let me come to my last slide uh um I just want to make you or let you know what are the lessons that we learned in the past 25 years when we actively developed the cluster so the first point I want to make for developing a life science cluster we have found out the cluster management has to be at least somehow independent of the cluster members because in this way you have many more possibilities for example an existing cluster perhaps doesn't want to have too many companies coming from abroad which might be the competitors if you're independent you can invite those companies and then another important point is of course you need a strategy to to develop a cluster strategy is essential but um but the cluster management very often has to work in an opportunistic way if you see a chance if you see a possibility you have to grab this chance so even if it does not fit exactly into the strategy maybe you have to adjust your strategy afterwards it was very important to learn from best practice but even more important to learn from worst practice or bad let's say at least bad practice of other clusters for that for that reason I co-founded several years ago the so-called Council of German bio regions and also the Council of European bioregions and the main purpose of of those associations is that we can learn from each other and I think there's a very open way to do that um when we're talking about new clusters to be implemented I think that that uh science which is driven by Innovation might be a very important point but equally uh good is let's say clinical Excellence which you should have in a place and I think in this way you have very good chances to develop also clusters from stretch which we somehow did in our region as well we had the chance to have both these factors available uh excellent science from both Munich universities and the other research institutes and the clinical excellence in especially in the University Hospitals that we have around here most important you need extensive networking and you need strong personal contacts they are so helpful to develop a cluster as we did in the past years so I'm here at my last slide here you can see our vision to make Bavaria a beautiful Bavarian to the place for the medicine of the future like many other places in the world will try to do so and I do not have to read you our vision but we as a cluster Management try to give the fullest support that we can give let's say to science but also to the companies which are driven by Innovation thank you very much very good okay can we push back to the full screen can you hear us in the in the plenum okay all right so I assume you can hear us yes so of course thank you so much I mean I mean one thing there's there's a vlog in there and I know from the other participants that some of this will be echoed and some have made very good and some have made uh not so good experiences I mean you showed that 25 years so this is not for the faint Target this is not for those people who just want to have a quick win this is real work for for the long long term so um Dr abdeli I mean should we have as the next speaker uh Dr Mahmoud Khan you know bringing it closer to closer to the kingdom you know having experience in the Kingdom knowing what is there and filling us in a little bit on what is going on there and what the plans are is that okay absolutely please fantastic okay excellent thank you I'm gonna thank you everybody hear me yeah um thank you Klaus I'm going to stand up as much so I can keep my body circulation going and uh rather than sitting I've only got three slides so I'm not sure if we're going to be able to see them but if we have I'll talk through them the first uh question I'm going to try and address is why is biotechnology important to leaders and decision makers I mean why are we even here the second if we can go to my next slide please the second question is then what does it take to create an ecosystem and the third is what can we do in the Kingdom to make that come to reality three questions let's start with the first one why is this important well you'll generally hear the statement that we need to do this to create a knowledge-based economy and that's great but if I'm a finance leader I'm a CFO I'm asking myself this is all good but what's the return let's take a look at a macro number first the most developed biotech ecosystem clearly is the United States and five percent of the U.S GDP today is actually anchored in biotech that's one trillion dollars of GDP so biotech is not just health biotech is Agro white manufacturing ingredient manufacturing the food system and health itself the relevance of bringing that up today is the need to invest in biotech is not just for the application of Health but the skills and tools that are developed in the talent base are applicable across this ecosystem and in mature ecosystems you'll see migration of talent between these industries it's an opportunity for growth and free-flowing of scientists between these different applications that's a key need and that actually helps nurture this knowledge-based economy the size of the pie is Big the fluidity is only going to continue to grow the second is of course that leads to the ability to lift local capabilities and I'll talk about that in the infrastructure the good news is the physical infrastructure the institutional infrastructure is quite mature in the Kingdom the talents will develop but it's not like the kingdom has to build this from scratch a significant amount of investment over the last two to three decades has brought the kingdom along quite a bit far in that Journey let me touch on the third one which is building local supplies and strategic assets one thing because the covet taught all Global entities businesses and governments is while optimization of Supply chains may give you the lowest cost at the time of a pandemic that becomes a vulnerability there are few industries that are not facing supply chain issues today because of increasing demand and the fragmentation between supply and demand the food industry is phasing it the pharmaceutical industry the automotive manufacturing the chip industry so really leadership has to decide what capabilities are needed from a business operation and what is needed from a supply continuity and there may be a desired need to create local Supply even at a slightly disadvantaged cost in the early stages of course scale will take care of that and of course that leads to Global competitiveness let me go to the next slide let's think about what you just heard in our from our last speaker of what it takes to build a successful biotech ecosystem every speaker will tell you without exception almost that it starts with Talent starts with people and the research institutions that they work in there are gaps in the Kingdom we have very good infrastructure we have well-trained scientists many now that are trained in the Kingdom numerous that over the years have trained and come back to the kingdom what we need to do is take this young talent and develop them into science leaders that's the gap once we start to identify it we can fill that so what will it take how do we do that and this is where the public private partnership for the 20 years I've worked on the industry side I don't train scientists as an industry executive the 20 years I was in Academia was my role of training scientists but the End customer of most of those scientists in developed ecosystems is actually industry the majority of scientists training institutions in Academia will actually get a job in the private sector if you're going to build a biotech ecosystem it's going to need that private sector and that private sector is going to need talent which is where it's going to rely on universities and how do you partner on that funding an entrepreneurial support is critical not only in investing but also what's the exit if people are going to invest if Venture Capital private Equity others the private sector is going to invest in this ecosystem it also needs to know how it's going to get a return and that return might be in profits it might be in exits it might be an IPO and a lot of discussion and thought into that I've put in the regulatory system and I think you're going to hear from a number of my colleagues today the regulatory system is not just the FDA when we're talking about the regulatory system we're talking about the regular system in its breadth whether that's intellectual property whether that's oversight whether that's I uh the drug approval process the financial markets the movement of data data ownership I.T all of those things will need to be thought through and brought to converge around solving the ecosystem's needs that's going to be a critical enabler now vibrant markets we hear about the fact that the Saudi the kingdoms for biopharmaceutical Market is about nine billion dollars not big by global standards however if you peel the onion a bit within that 9 billion you start to see granularity which gives you opportunity two billion of that is biopharmaceuticals the biggest part is so-called solid small molecules however a small molecule Market is growing at one percent compound annual growth rate the biopharma part is growing at 17 percent that is going to rapidly double and continue to grow most innovation in the Pharma industry is happening in that sector so as we think about the growth potential not only for the kingdom which is the largest market in the region the Mena market and the biopharma market of what already exists and what's coming is going to be very significant what is really interesting is if you think about the top 10 biopharma molecules that make up the biggest Market all of them are due to expire within the next 48 to 60 months that is the opportunity of what biosimilars and a whole variety of other new entrants will give us and then of course you have to sell the ecosystem people need to learn about the opportunity and meetings like this start that conversation my next and last slide so what can we Leverage from Saudi and what's the competitive advantage if we set off and say we're going to create Silicon Valley or we're going to create Cambridge Massachusetts it's such a daunting task yes it took 25 years it's not going to happen overnight the key here is to identify what is the Kingdom's competitive advantage what is the unique opportunity that can be leveraged within the kingdom and how do we go about it and there are some the country has developed a very powerful highly competitive clinical competence as a country you can get today the diversity and depth of medical care that is state of the art with very few exceptions within the kingdom I had a chance to launch and help launch The Residency program of internal medicine the King Faisal Specialist Hospital back in 1986 when I was a young chief resident in the 30-some years when I saw it in 1986 versus today the country has come a Quantum Leap in clinical capabilities question is how can we leverage that that leads to Talent which is clearly both exists and increasingly is coming back very well trained there is a clear political will to lead in this direction and the capital exists clearly available through a number of sources in our previous speakers in the previous session talked about different sources of funding the market size several people have touched on and the location is Central to this region all these are strategic strategic advantages the one thing I'd add on the location is as one identifies this what you'll hear is the discussion around clusters not country it you have to have a clear early cluster of where that cluster is going to sit surrounded by good academic centers good clinical centers financial markets decision makers and the free flow of ideas and information between these players that cannot happen all remotely one of the things we've learned is that informal conversation is powerful in exchanging ideas and that's why clusters work that's why Cambridge Massachusetts works that's why Munich works that's why Boston works that's why San Francisco works Cambridge and Oxford work these are critical things to think about some learned lessons to avoid some pitfalls Klaus touched on this I want to distinguish between quick wins and early wins we need early wins to keep the momentum going to get the excitement not only for leadership but for young people to say I want to be part of this they need to have that inspiration but let's not confuse that with a quick win just which is an overnight and is not sustainable finally this will lead to Lasting achievements those are critical and the ROI has to be measured not just in financial returns but on economic returns to the country and the society where this is operationalizing once we start thinking about this as economic returns we will go away from short-term Roi to truly measuring this as impact on GDP and impact on the society itself including job creation that is critical and that requires that public-private partnership Strategic investment and Leadership by the government enables that there are numerous vehicles to do that and I'll finish off by saying what is now we're seeing in the Kingdom is all three sectors are coming in the academic sector the private sector although nascent is starting to see this and we're going to hear more and more about it the government sector and now the non-profit sector the non-profit sector itself is a powerful force across in mature markets and the kingdom is taking the first steps to actually add to that whether we look at institutions like the academic institutions United States the welcome trust is a powerful force in medical research the Gates Foundation the buck Institute doing aging research the broad Institute at MIT all of these are powerful drivers of knowledge creation backed both by government philanthropy and private and the kingdom is taking some very powerful steps in leading in all of these areas now as these become to converge so it gives me a lot of excitement a lot of inspiration to see not only looking back of what has been done while it's taken time time but really if I could leave with one thought this next decade is the decade of biology Life Sciences enabled by powerful computational capability in mathematics and that's what makes this next decade different than the past the information age and the computational mathematics capabilities have now come of age in biology the kingdom has both capabilities now the question is do we have the wisdom and the leadership to knit those together and operationalize this thank you and I'll hand over thank you thank you so much I mean that's very very good and also anchoring it to the to the kingdom and I think what's fascinating here is your point your your last point also that we don't have to worry that everything has been invented already because the space is so wide open and it's changing and what you said that basically the the math side the information Tech side comes in now and gives another opportunity you know I think also we can see that there is some overlap already in in the learnings you know the the aspect of in a way I would call it the cluster and the cluster management the horse described that before having a cluster strategy and I would say the cool thing here is that you have players in there that cooperate and compete you know and do this at the same time so the old logic of open your mind and see that that you basically increase the pie instead of saying who gets the pie I think particularly particularly in many any of the previous discussions I think this is important to inject so should we go World War II to the next speaker and I believe with Richard is you you are up Richard is the Chief Operating Officer of Rockland immunochemicals he has been in this business for quite a while has seen pretty much everything and has now decided to grow a beard you know so so Richard I mean we're looking forward to it to your remarks Klaus thank you can can you hear me in the in the room yeah yes perfectly well there we go good um and I think I'll need help advancing the slides because the controller that I have here is uh doesn't seem to be working so I will speak to that as we go forward if you go to the next slide please and there I was pre-covered and so you can see what's happened a bit to me pre-covered as uh it's been a dramatic change uh uh as Klaus said I'm Richard Smith I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Rockland we're just outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania um that's the uh if you could go forward to one slide that would be great uh Philadelphia is the one cluster when people talk about the United States that you don't hear about everybody will talk about San Francisco everyone will talk about Boston but we're all interconnected and I think that you can see the Promise in that for what you're doing in Saudi Arabia uh I'm going to look at this from the standpoint of entrepreneurs and for me one of the things that's really important is history and in Philadelphia we used to be the political and financial capital of the United States uh back in the 1700s uh and so uh that position was important to us because what it led to is the industrialist of the the 19th century and if you would stick a pin in the map in the 20th century and go 50 miles outside of Philadelphia you would probably touch every uh major pharmaceutical company that exists uh in the world now would have been in that in some way shape or form within that Circle uh in the 20th century and all that's important to how Philadelphia has developed and I think as we think about it in Saudi Arabia it's going to be important to think about the history of Saudi Arabia where you've been and how you've gotten there to think about what your strengths are and what the obstacles are that you're going to face and I think Dr Khan really late laid that out well but let me tell you a little bit more about Philadelphia's journey is that in the late 20th century Wall Street told Pharma companies stop doing research what you make money doing is through distribution so you really focused on Distributing uh therapies of course they're all small molecule therapies at the time and don't Focus so much on research because there's such a diminishing return and it's really expensive so the Pharma companies fired all of their r d departments laid them off and you know that created a lot of economic disruption but what it also created was thousands of garage entrepreneurs and so they went home they told their families and then they said okay let's pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and we have to start doing something and that's really when the Philadelphia cluster started to emerge is you started to see those people form companies to fill that vacuum and to figure out how to get it done now a lot of those entrepreneurs didn't succeed and they failed or moved to Boston or San Francisco wherever else that they thought that they could get the opportunity and where it was coming together many of them went into Academia uh and others went into other uh Pursuits and maybe came back at a later point in time but that was the the nascent beginning of uh of the cluster and then what happened is uh we started moving away from small molecules into large molecules and as it turned out there's quite a bit of talent here in the academic and medical uh institutions and there's a lot of research being done at Penn in the chop and at other institutions and that was quite important to Philadelphia's uh development and later as cell and gene therapy became the central point for Philadelphia uh the the name that was coined was Silicon Valley uh as a as a take on Silicon Valley of course uh to show what could be done and in the slide there you see a couple of facts that are important uh to Falcon Valley I'll talk about them a little bit more but the two that are being promoted is in in this case one in six doctors have been to Philadelphia sometime in their career in the United States and this is the area that has the uh first FDA approved gene therapy and that was approved by a spark so if we could move forward please all right so when you're looking at a biotech ecosystem as an entrepreneur you really want to sit down and say what are the assets available this is a Community have all the features that you need and if it does have all those features why is it attractive to you what can you do what will you be able to leverage where can you get your funding what's the support that you have what's going to be important to you when you think back about those two facts that I talked about the first Fact one in six doctors have been educated in Philadelphia it's a nice fact but it doesn't get you across the finish line the the issue there is that you uh have a really strong infrastructure to train people uh but you're not necessarily converting all that Talent into the local cluster it's being spread across uh the United States being spread across the world and as an entrepreneur and you're trying to pick where you're going to go you're going to say well it's interesting that that part's there but what's been the problem in retaining those people over time the other fact that it speaks to is uh the the spark example spark was the company that got the FDA approval um spark uh uh is a good example from the entrepreneurs start a point of view because um it shows you that a company can make it in this ecosystem and it can make it big uh Spark uh was acquired by Roche for over five billion dollars a couple of years ago I remember going to a party at spark about five or six years ago the entire company fit within uh a large uh conference room uh and then they invited a lot of guests to come in and it filled up their facility at the at the Science Center now spark has grown so much that the science center no longer is sufficient to house them and they've moved into uh Schuylkill yards and is one of the developing biotech facilities in Philadelphia that's important to the growth is that build out of the of the facilities uh that's that's needed you can see from uh what horse said um you could go and and look at what the other clusters do as you're assessing uh whether a ecosystem can support what you want to do you want to look at all the factors that are out there Talent Capital uh infrastructure all those things that have been talked about before those are sort of the minimum that you need to get started but you want also want to start to ask so what makes you unique what is it that you have that other people don't have or how are you going to focus all of that strength that you have around those things that that can make a difference and so what other people have done is they've looked at topics like diversity or sustainability as topics that are important to what they're trying to do and people have a lot of interest in I gave a presentation not long ago on making our company more sustainable and by that the focus was what's our impact on on the the globe and on the uh on climate it was something that I didn't expect at the end is every employee to a person at Rockland was tremendously interested in that as a topic and wanted to get to work right away on that we've never had that kind of universal reaction to a particular topic and so that would be one that I would think about as I was looking at new bio clusters and what the opportunities might be Associated uh with those um before we move to the next slide I'll make one more point and that is is does the ecosystem accept failure wealth uh and I think that you know as you look at how the Clusters get funded it's important so you're going to have funding from the government that's important funding it helps get things off the ground um but we all want our governments to succeed and our governments want to tell us that they're succeeding so they're not the best barometers of failure private equity on the other hand is quick to tell you when you're not doing well and that's good medicine to have because then you know how to Pivot when to Pivot uh and what to start thinking about in terms of making the improvements so that you're successful but even if you're not successful you want to look at how well the ecosystem treats failure and how it deals with the people who have failed Boston is a great example if you go look at the people who now work at moderna uh and look at the senior people who worked at moderna one thing they really don't have on their CDs is where it didn't work out but talk to each one of them and you'll learn that many of them have failures in their uh in their careers and they learn from them and we're able to move forward such that they ended up in a place like moderna so what that tells you as an entrepreneur is if you go and risk your entire career to go build something in a place like Boston that that ecosystem says the talent is just too important to lose even though that there was a failure let's put them back to work uh within this ecosystem so that we can repurpose and reuse and pivot the use of that town I think that's a really important lesson for Bio clusters that are getting started how do you Embrace everybody uh in that ecosystem whether they're succeeding or failing because the failure tends to be temporary if you get this part right if we can go to the next slide so here we've talked about many of these features are ready um but I'll I'll talk about it from the standpoint uh of what you might be thinking about from an entrepreneur's uh perspective uh that is is that as you think about where you might locate you're going to think about what's the availability of capital what's the availability of talent What's the environment what's the medical system like uh what's the academic institution like and how open is that system to change and trying new things so importantly you have to start thinking about what your obstacles are and how you're going to remove those obstacles I've heard a lot about the regulatory environment that is a challenge in Saudi Arabia in terms of how quickly you can move and I think that it's right to think about that holistically it's not just the regulatory Authority who approves the uh the Therapeutics but it's also what's the IP structure look like what's a legal structure look like in terms of the speed at which you can start up companies but also what's the uh intellectual property protections that exist in that system all of those things are going to be critical uh to success as as you you move forward and here in the background of this slide is is another uh success these are the renderings for the science center this uh in Philadelphia the science center is the location where many startup companies come in and start and one of the biggest occupants of the science center which is a is a separate Center uh with separate Labs that uh qualified companies can come in and rent uh is that much of its growth is driven by entrepreneurs who are coming out of Academia and so that's a place or out of the medical system so out of pen and chop uh so if you look at Carl June for example one of the leaders in cell gene therapy in Philadelphia started t t immunity a company around T-cell Therapies so one of the one of the strengths that Philadelphia has had has been that infrastructure and we've worked really hard to be able to deploy the talent that was already there and as a risk-free way as possible to allow them to come out of Academia come out of the hospital systems maintain a foothold there so that they felt secure uh but also participate in starting up new companies and becoming the entrepreneurs around some of the most important cell and Gene Therapies in the world and so that would be a part of this cluster that I would say Saudi Arabia to take a very close look at because it's something that's helped Drive our success and I know the success in other uh clusters around the world but even even in successful clusters it hasn't always worked if you heard horse say earlier one of the failures that they've had is well when enact academic fails how does he go back into that system and and have the security of going back into that system so it's something that you will be able to find both successes and failures within the Clusters around the world and I think if we go to the next slide which I believe is my last slide uh the important part here is you want to make sure you also think about the culture that you're in so what's depicted here is an Amish horse carriage and it might look like that's from the 19th century but this is something that's very common in the Pennsylvania area is the Amish community who lives here among all of us in the Philadelphia region and what that does is it's always a reminder uh that we are anchored both uh in the past and in the present and we need to think about what our whole Community is and why we're doing this why are we spending all this effort and energy around the bio cluster whether it be in Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco or in Riyadh is you need to think about how to make it work within your culture and your community as well as make sure you have the collaboration and connectivity with the rest of the world because that's how we're able to push new idea ideas of foreign so that Klaus Richard thank you thank you and I I find your your story is very interesting because it is a story of a cluster that came out of adversity you know and and it was not something that which more often happens you know that people design something and try to make it happen as we heard in the Munich example you know so it also shows to me it started with as you described it I mean the the many of the Pharma firms are based in in the New Jersey region you're close to Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania is just a great place to live you know so that's that's that's where they lived and they they then commuted over there and suddenly they didn't have a job I think it was a great reminder of and the the importance of talent because it was really the talent that started it it was not a political movement or so I think this is very very fascinating and one of my experiences in life you know that in the end it's all around I mean one person can make a big difference you know and you see that in a wonderful way in in the kingdom and it's my great pleasure with that said to have Dr manal speaking as our next speaker I mean it's it's wonderful to to have you here and I think we can ground it back bring this back to the kingdom and then um with Walter you know go back into the big wide world and then have a joint discussion you know so Dr manal over to you foreign I will be giving um I think my talk I'm not sure if they're going to have the slides the slides um so good morning good afternoon good evening everyone my name is and I'm the chairman of innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kmart and I will be talking little bit today about and giving you an overview about the Innovation activities at Kmart and at our institution so so the table of content of my talk is going to focus on three areas as you can see uh first I'll start talking about the Innovation System in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and then I'll move and give you an overview about the Innovation cycle at Kmart I will conclude with some and give you some information about our Innovation services and some our achievements next please uh so I'm sure you heard the latest news that was uh actually released by a nature index we are proud that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ranked the first in the Arab world and the second in both Western Asia and the Mina region on this year nature index in addition 64 of our research actually output from the 17 Arab countries was actually produced by Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia also ranked the 29th globally in addition Saudi Arabia ranked the first in the Arab countries in chemistry Earth and environmental sciences and life sciences and physical sciences and of course thanks to King Salman Ben abdulaziz and the Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman for his support in research and Innovation and also development it is actually clear in the objective of 2030 as we all know and as a result we actually progress the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia progressed rapidly in the recent years and this is actually seen in our publication where we produce over 20 000 25 000 publication per year and More Than 3 000. Saudi Arabia Arabia became the knowledge Creator in the Mina region next please however we still have long way to go as you can see so looking at other metrics Saudi Arabia rank 66 among other countries mentioned in the G in the global Innovation index in 2020. fight that and looking at that index actually if you look at the uh if you look at the shop pillars of research and development you'll find that we actually uh rank the 27th so this tells you that we are actually not that far away from the G countries we're really close and the 66 ranking is because we there's other factors that we have to work on for example Saudi Arabia performs better in Innovation inputs than Innovation outputs in 2020. so what is an innovation system an innovation system is actually an input an engine and an output and of course there is a strategy on top of it and we expect an uh an impact out of this on the national uh on a national level uh so let's dissect that Innovation System further as you see there's an input and in the input there's the enablers where we see uh agencies that create policies and regulations and funding agencies and awareness and then if we move to the engine here we find the activities and the function where we see research development and Innovation and commercialization and of course we need assets such as capital human capital and infrastructure and the main player actually they're the actors where we have actors from the public realm and actors from the private realm so from the public realm is actually like the uh universities and research centers around the kingdom and private uh such as sabic and aramco now the output is actually the output is actually where you uh look for kpis where you calculate and measure your success for research for example you look at your Publications your collaborations your citations and for development we look at the number of patents and demonstration projects uh as an example and of course for commercialization and Innovation number of spin-offs and startups so we're doing well in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia however we we would like to be on the top globally uh so uh we're producing a lot of research we we are we should work on the quality of our research as well we should produce more patents and we should also focus on uh creating high-tech experts now regarding the engine we do have we have to uh do also we have to improve uh a lot of gaps as well we're still doing uh really well but I think uh improving uh the infrastructure and working in our human capital and orienting our science and the scientific research towards industry is really important to create biotechnology parks so I will not focus in this talk on the really the gaps on uh policies and which is included in the input or output Alpha the focus is actually the engine so next here uh as you from our previous slides you can see that we developed understanding and knowledge and we identify the gaps in Saudi Arabia so we actually know what are the issues that we need to solve and we've been working on it and feeling and feeling these uh these gaps the engine is really an important component in Innovation System and that's why I'm focusing on it especially that King Abdel International Medical Research Center is actually one player of these of the public actors in This engine who contributed to the Innovation cycle taking them to fulfill the objectives of vision 2030. so now I'll move next and speak a little bit about Kmart Innovation contribution so kmark we do actually uh realize that these gaps and we contributed to uh to these uh issues by developing the full line so kmark has the research and development and also the Innovation and I will be highlighting each part in my next slides uh before I start the slides I really I want to highlight that one of the biggest problem and why we focused on uh um on the Innovation cycle is uh the issue of moving research from Lab to the market and monetizing it this is a critical issue so if you have the full cycle and moving it uh smoothly you will be able to reach the market and we've been doing that for a couple of years and I will show you uh I'll talk about each component and highlight some of our achievements and contribution so let's start with research so as you can see uh we have we made tangible contribution uh in different research projects with the realm of biomedical and biomedical and therapy development as well so we chose specific uh topics that our research is focused on so we do we focus on rare and genetic diseases infectious diseases and neurosciences disorders and blood and cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and there is a lot of sub projects running under these topics regarding human capital we actually have our scholarship programs where we train our staff and we have a lot of postdocs and Physicians and scientists in our institution the infrastructure infrastructure we are actually we have different facilities distributed around the kingdom in the middle and the Western and the Eastern region as well and the unique thing is there are actually a facility connected to the university and to the medical cities and the hospitals so I'll move and talk a little bit about the development effort that we've been doing at Kmart so we do a lot of translational and clinical uh development and we have a record in clinical trial over 1 over 100 clinical trials in different diseases we recently received the national clinical initiative from the industrial Logistics development program uh and regarding our human capital we have a special program focused on clinical trial where uh where we train staff Physicians and produce uh research coordinators in specialized in clinical field uh regarding the infrastructure we also created our own uh clinical trial units with multi-disciplinary teams that is highly experienced and we have access to over a million and a half patients in our hospitals so moving to the Innovation and commercialization we also uh fill the Gap in Innovation and uh and commercialization uh k-mark they have their own office Under The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Department uh called The Innovation and Technology transfer office they identify and capture potential Innovative projects and services and patents from research and or we close we work closely with the biotechnology Park led by Dr Abdullah Ali howdy and our human capital we actually we give seminars trained entrepreneurs we're doing or launching an entrepreneurship center with in collaboration with the university hopefully soon infrastructure we established also our instructor infrastructure for the biotechnology Park we wanted to have a solid infrastructure that but that will serve our innovation so next I will be talking a little bit about our services uh so the technology transfer office support uh capturing potential ideas we ideas we file patents and we register trademark and copyrights and I will be in the next slide showing some of our services so we do ideation and Consultation Services we do a screening and translations intellectual property Legal Services Innovations awareness and Entrepreneurship next so in collaboration also with the biotechnology Park we we work as partners and we do most of our projects together so we do visibility studies and Market surveys uh prototyping trla assessment agreement and contracts and addition commercialization assessment licensing and of course spin-offs now this is the this is the intellectual property patent process as you can see so we receive invention disclosure from around from our institution from around the kingdom uh where we do analysis and we do filing and then of course we maintain our patents for a couple of years I would like to add also that we file nationally and internationally I'll be talking about some of them in next slides now this is also the copyright and trademark process map we also receive application from the different regions from our institution and we screen them in-house and assess them and we do the filing either nationally or internationally around the globe we do the examination and we receive the certificates for our inventors and we shared with them for example we recently received the mngha Eye Care trademark and copyright next so some numbers um as you can see we received over 200 idfs and we have 33 issued patent and 46 patent under processing that we believe that they will be released actually soon and 11 copyrights and three tiered marks next uh so regarding the national office we received 70 uh idfs and we submitted over 55 and we have one copyright and one trademark next so this is to show you that we've been around for a really couple of years uh around over six years and we've been uh productive even with the covid-19 pandemic we received our uh idfs and worked on our patents so the categories of the distribution of our idfs as you can see the top is actually medical devices and next to it is drug Discovery next so distribution of the issued patent also over the years we had a spike couple of years and we expect another Spike coming soon and we get our patents from different areas around the kingdom next again the categories distribution of the register patent um it seems uh that the top uh is always medical devices which is really um expected since we're working with Physicians and actually creating them as a product would be much easier so I think we have a sophisticated patents in our hands this is our submitted pattern so as in 2020 we actually thought of uh we we've been submitting our ideas around the globe uh depends on the market that we think that we can develop our product in and since uh um we would like to uh fulfill the objective of vision 2030 we're shifting to submit uh nationally to this Audi patent office so uh so we can also introduce our product in the Saudi Market so again the top is always medical devices and next is drug Discovery and comes after it Diagnostics next so when we classify our products we see that most of them actually around 70 percent they're uh they fall into the red biotechnology classification and next is actually the gold biotechnology uh uh area and after that which is also expected that less green and biotechnology and white and we we were expecting that it's going to be bred by technology because we focus actually most of our work is on health development next now through the Innovation and commercialization we produce products and also we offer services and I will show you some of our products potential products and services that we offer so I will start with uh with the products uh we do this through the technology transfer office where we identify the ideas and then we file them and start creating our products next so this is some of our uh our potential products as you can see a lot of them medical instruments uh uh such as medical Cutters knee cartilage replacement dumping Dental route a post key and many many others and then we see a lot of drug Discovery and um diagnostic testing next in this slide you see some of the diagnostic tests that we're planning to develop and okay and next um one of the products that we're working on developing together with the biotechnology Park uh with Dr abdilal healthy is the artificial hypothalamus for regulating body temperature and we've been focusing on that product and others but I I had this one on display as an example and it's in collaboration with Advanced electronic company NeXT so the technology transfer of the the commercialization and Innovation Department actually also offers services and I through the biotechnology Park and I'll show you some of them so uh this is only some selected uh services so we do have the bio equivalence and pharmaceutical Services uh and and provide biobanking services internally we provide also clinical trials uh services and cord blood biobanking and we've been doing this for a really couple of years in the institution next so going back and focusing on the human capital uh uh in developing human capital focused on Innovation and Entrepreneurship we do have we do have seminars and workshops we raise awareness we Inspire and motivate students and also researchers and physicians in high-tech Innovations and Business Development we actually provide them the environment and the support we identify innovative ideas and we help them to protect it we also teach them how to actually use academic and clinical research for springboard and start their own businesses and preparing entrepreneurs to enter the market with working with the university also to launch the entrepreneurship Center now we also offer we also offer an innovation uh an innovation budget and this is focused on developing a specific product that we believe that are close to the market we have over 12 000 students and we have uh over a thousand scientists and more than one five uh 1500 Physicians and in the end uh I would like to conclude that we also have a biotechnology Park as I mentioned a couple of times we have the facility spaces and and the offices and we incubate many different projects one two of them UFC and by equivalence so this is my last slide and I would like to summarize that uh really the conclusion from my talk that we as kmark identified some of these gaps and we are trying by creating that Innovation pipeline to fill some of the gaps in The Innovation System in the in Saudi Arabia as one player of the actors in The Innovation System thank you very much thank you and this is very very impressive and if you think of what a horse started us off with saying that it took 25 years to achieve the successes and I think that's one of the themes that we've been hearing also from others you know and so you you've been around for six years and you've just gone through this you know this is quite quite impressive quite impressive achievement and I think a great resource in in the cluster I mean fantastic so the water water is a Serial entrepreneur you know he is Chairman and CEO of molecule and biotech you know and he's been around for a while and he's seen a lot you know so what are we love to hear from you what what you see and could give us as an advice to accelerate the biotech cluster in the Kingdom thanks Klaus and uh congratulations to you and Abdul Ali on your roles in hosting what looks to be an amazing conference um as a make sure yeah actually the clicker works that's fantastic so as a brief introduction uh I started my first company when I was 25. I grew it to 400 million in revenues and number one on the Inc 500 list of America's fastest growing companies and since then I've raised close to a billion dollars in development stage funding and two of my companies are currently listed on NASDAQ and I'm especially happy to announce that ABV has just agreed to acquire one of them but with all of that said I'm not an expert in biotech clusters and I'm compelled to be clear that the other members of this panel know a lot more about biotech clusters than I do but I do hope that I can add something to the conversation from the perspective of a biomedical developer who's faced with having to choose where to invest my assets when exploring the use of incentives to attract biotechnology development it's helpful to try and think like a small biotech company over the last 15 years as big Pharma has dramatically scaled back their in-house r d small biotechs have filled the Gap and we now account for more than half of the new drugs approved during that period but we small biotechs take on what I think of as the most perilous part of the drug development Journey known as translational development our job is to take discoveries from the bench and get them to the bedside where they can help patients but only a very small percentage of us will succeed and that's why this part of the journey is affectionately known as the valley of death but as scary as this sounds the potential rewards are enormous and every year more and more Capital flows into small biotechs to fuel this ecosystem more importantly for purposes of this conversation translational development represents the single biggest opportunity for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to become a leader in the biotechnology sector I say this because the single biggest element of translational development is clinical trials and hosting clinical trials isn't just a big opportunity for the kingdom it's where the KSA can become a world leader now I know that sounds a bit lofty but let me add some perspective that helps support this vision even though my drug development company is based in the U.S we actually conduct a lot of clinical trial activity in Poland now at first you might not think to compare KSA to Poland but there are some remarkable similarities the GDP of these countries is similar and the populations are close to the same size and interestingly per capita Health Care spending is almost identical but in stark contrast in 2019 Poland conducted 6296 clinical trials Saudi Arabia 660. so what's going on here well Poland wasn't always this active in fact in 2011 Poland conducted only 449 clinical trials but the difference is that the Kingdom's clinical trial activity remained relatively flat while Poland experienced dramatic growth one of the key differences for Poland was that in 2013 the European Union kicked off what they called Horizon 2020 and this investment program supplied 700 million in grant funding for Poland's biotech sector sounds kind of familiar doesn't it sounds a lot like Vision 2030 although I haven't heard yet what the biotech investment might be in the Kingdom Walter if um yes so sorry for the interruption I was just told that we will have to cut our session short for our urgent matter and preparation for next session um can we like limited to another two three minutes in I know that you're exceptional speaker you can summarize 30 minutes in three minutes it's not a challenge for you thank you so much fair enough then then let's uh let me advance the slides and uh just get to where I would like to take this conversation which is to say basically I believe the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a unique opportunity not just to catch up with the rest of the world but essentially to become a leader in clinical trial activity and let me explain what I mean by that in very brief terms the most important thing to a small biotech company like mine is time if I can save time I make a lot more money and my investors make a lot more money and so cutting through all of the preamble to this what I wanted to propose to this group is a series of steps that could essentially catapult the kingdom into a leadership position not just a follower position in clinical trials and it comes down to five simple steps these are very specific but they're very meaningful the kingdom has the opportunity to create fast track status for everyone who does a clinical trial in in Saudi Arabia but I'm talking about real fast track status not just symbolic fast track status that means enabling enough Personnel within the kfda to ensure that no sponsor is ever waiting on an opportunity to seek regulatory guidance likewise a standard form of clinical trial contract could essentially dramatically shorten the timeline that we generally follow to begin a clinical trial in the U.S and in Europe every hospital has a different contract and sorting all that out is one of the longest lead time audits sometimes six to nine months is lost while we try to get started in all of these collections of hospitals if if the kingdom had a standard form contract for clinical trial activity with sponsors and all of the hospitals in in the entire country had to agree to the same form that would cut an enormous amount of time out of the typical biotech lead time to get a clinical trial started another opportunity is to create a centralized database of all of the patients in the entire Kingdom I believe that KSA is one of the few countries because it is a kingdom it's one of the few countries on the planet that has the opportunity to do this and do it quickly the reason this is valuable and a great example is the uh the medical evaluations unit in the UK did this for their local community and it's a huge selling point for them but essentially I can walk into that group and say how many patients do you have that fit my inclusion exclusion criteria and how quickly can you access them why is that important to me because a recruitment is the longest element of any clinical trial you it's usually when clinical trials run too long it's because it took them longer than they thought to recruit and it always takes us longer than we think but this is a a very real mechanism that the kingdom could offer to say we we have the answers for you in advance as to how much time you need to allocate for Recruitment and then finally uh the the centralized database approach to this could be supplemented by a centralized IRB one of the longest one of the other longest lead time items in beginning a clinical trial is getting institutional review board approval universities are legendary for how long they take to approve a given protocol Unfortunately they work on their own time scales and frankly they don't really care about what the execution timeline is for a clinical trial they'll get to it when they get to it well the workaround in the U.S for some institutions is to not use a university IRB at all but rather to use a commercial IRB now these are organizations that are sanctioned by the FDA they're responsible to the FDA but they're run like businesses so instead of waiting for three or four months for an Institutional University review board to approve my protocol all a commercial IRB can approve it in a couple of weeks usually not no longer than a month so what I've just described could easily take one year off the typical commercial timeline for a clinical trial for a sponsor like me we've done the calculation in one of my earlier slides would do the math for you but fund them at the bottom line if you save me a year in the development of one of my drugs that's worth over a hundred million dollars in Net Present Value uh worth of that particular drug in that particular indication for me and I've got six drugs with with multiple indications so we're talking about even for one company the potential of more than a billion dollars worth of value can be gained by compressing time and so I'll leave you with the this this thought and that is the uh the last slide and that is that covet has shown us what's possible and uh what I would like to encourage us to do is to essentially use that as a springboard to say other things can move quickly too uh in in my field of oncology uh maybe millions of lives aren't at stake but thousands of lies are at stake that's reason enough for us to want to move quickly and I think covid-19 has shown all of us shown us the world that systems like ours can move more quickly and I believe that the kingdom could actually become a leader in speed of execution of clinical trials and if they do I think it actually could become a trademark a branding of of the opportunity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia so I appreciate the opportunity to share uh that sort of very specific thought but as an entrepreneur I can't I can't help myself I always want to look at the system and say what can we do right now to make a big difference I think this is one of those things thanks Klaus no thank you thank you very much and I don't know I heard Dr Abdullahi whether we still have have a minute to to talk um it looks like really we are at the uh at the last minute of our session my really apologies to you Klaus and to all the distinguished members of this of this panel for uh Catholic Church can I just one say one one thing yeah you know because I when when we started this you know with your idea you know to start this I I was concerned you know that we would get a really really good session with lots of content and good practical stuff I want and that's why I said my arm still hurts you know but but but I tell you I am so happy about this session particularly because I make notes here and we can sit down in another another road with a very practical things that we can take away we are not perfect but I mean what the session today showed us is we have a lot of great things that are there and that are a core and a foundation we just have to I mean as horse started off put it in a train you know get some management structure around it and kick it off and do it good cooperative and competitive way you know so really thank you thank you to all the speakers and thank you to putting us all together so really appreciate this thank you so much Klaus Richard thanks a lot Klaus thanks and Wally and of course um manal and Mahmoud thank you so much all and I'm sure it's thank you continue thank you very much okay very good hmm thank you Dr Abdul Ali and your esteemed panelists for this a great session uh the chat slide on the future of biotechnology that will undoubtedly enhance the lives of human and Global ecosystem such an interesting session thank you all and now we're about to begin a long break for one hour you can follow the conversations of our sessions on Twitter at rgmbs2021 and also participate in the discussion by using the hashtag rgmbs2021 we'd love to hear from you so share with us your feedback and Views sharing this um hashtag and we'll be back at 7 pm real time for the opening ceremony stay connected thank you all foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: add enterprise

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Id: dpXt9TkvXC0

Length: 111min 15sec (6675 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021