Season 03: episode 16
What a year 2022 has been! Successes, challenges and change have come in their droves, and the pharmaceutical industry has continued to see tremendous progress. This week’s season finale episode welcomes back some friends of the podcast – most of whom we interviewed on the show this year – to reflect on the past 12 months and give us their take on their key highlights.
Hear Aliya Omer, Claire Gillis, Robert Grimm, Michele Manto, Paul Simms and Wendy White, unravel the past year in pharma, looking at everything from access challenges to organisational change to huge wins for marketing approaches and sharing some fascinating insights.
The GOLD team wishes you a very restful holiday season and a very happy new year! Don’t forget to tune back in for Season 3’s ‘GOLD Nugget’ highlights in January, along with our much-anticipated 2023 pharma forecast – not one to be missed!
A little more on GOLD’s guests…
Aliya Omer is the Vice President and Head of Global Portfolio and Program Strategy at Kite Pharma – a Gilead company focused on cell therapy targeting tumours. She has lived and worked across four continents over her extensive career of almost 20 years in the pharmaceutical and consumer health industries, but now calls Los Angeles home. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Materials Science Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from INSEAD.
Claire Gillis is CEO of VMLY&R Health. A formidable leader in the health and pharma space, she is passionate about using data, creativity and integrated communications to help more people around the world access better healthcare. She has a background in pharmacology and health economics, and founded a specialist medical access consultancy called WG Group in 1996. In 2010, WG Group was bought by WPP, and she became International CEO of WPP Health Practice from 2016-2019, during which time she was named the inaugural winner of Women in Marketing’s ‘Best Marketing Leader in Creating Change in Health and Wellness’ award. Claire joined VMLY&R as its CEO at the agency’s conception in September 2020.
Michele Manto is passionate about bringing life-changing innovation from the lab to patients and society. As Chief Commercial Officer, he is responsible for building and leading Galapagos’ commercialisation organisation and capabilities, as Galapagos evolves into a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company. A management engineering graduate, Michele joined the pharmaceutical industry in 2004 and has worked in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands and the US. He joined Galapagos in 2017, bringing with him extensive rheumatology and immunology experience – ideal for a company focused on inflammatory disease.
Robert Grimm is a digital marketing mogul, holding 10 years of experience within the field across five continents. Having worked in a range of industries, including healthcare and eCommerce marketing, he made his way into the pharmaceutical industry upon joining life sciences company TrialBee in 2019, where he worked to digitalise clinical research and patient recruitment. Now, as Digital Marketing and Transformation Manager at Novo Nordisk, Robert has assisted the company in fostering a customer-centric mindset.
A well-known face on the pharma conference circuit, Paul Simms, CEO of Impatient Health, is passionate about provoking meaningful change in order to realise the huge, unfulfilled potential of the industry and life sciences as a whole. Perhaps best known for his 17 years at the helm of eyeforpharma, which was acquired by Reuters in 2019, he created some of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest and most influential events. In 2020, he set up Impatient Health – an industry think tank and consultancy that aims to help pharma become more ambitious and creative.
Currently serving as Interim CEO of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, Wendy White has been an integral member of the Association for the past 15 years, earning her the title of the HBA’s Strategic Transformation Achievement Recognition (STAR) recipient for 2022. A pioneer in the areas of social media and patient-centered rare disease marketing, Wendy sold and integrated her digital marketing agency Siren Interactive to Dohmen Life Sciences (now Eversana) where she’d previously spent several years as a Life Science Executive. She also served as a Chief Patient Officer for Vitrisa Therapeutics, and currently serves on several boards and advisory boards including as Board Director for medical device company CEEK Women’s Health.
