Rick R. Suárez: "We invest 30% of the profit in innovation in Spain"

The British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced a few days ago that it was redoubling its commitment to Spain: it will invest 1.3 billion euros until 2027 and create 2,000 jobs in the global innovation center that it has installed in Barcelona, ??which will be one of the group’s great innovation hubs.

AstraZeneca is in the minds of many of our readers as the manufacturer of one of the Covid vaccines. And the only European one. What did the pandemic mean for the company?

For me it was one of the most complicated and sweetest moments of my career. I arrived here in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, and working hand in hand with the Government and without profit, we were able to bring one of the vaccines that changed life in Spain and in 190 countries, ensuring that millions of people could survive.

Has the vaccine changed your company?

We have learned that we have to remember and remember that covid still exists. And we must continue providing our vaccine to the countries that need it, but we also have immunocompromised patients, in whom vaccines do not work. They are transplant recipients, or cancer patients, and we learned that we have to dedicate ourselves to that group, which is not yet protected. So we have created another therapeutic area, which is vaccines and immunotherapies, which will also be investigated from the Barcelona hub. And we have also learned that we can move much faster than we thought. Remember that the AstraZeneca vaccine, together with the University of Oxford, was made in nine months. There is a lot to learn there, in how we and the states can move faster to put new drugs on the market, always with the necessary quality.

The covid vaccine seems to have been an exception, because Spain is one of the countries where new medications take the longest to reach the patient.

Yes. This is one of the things that we have always asked for during the conversations to bring our hub to the country, the need to accelerate this access and position ourselves at the level of other countries, such as Germany. I believe that our investments can also help accelerate the incorporation of innovation, making authorities and healthcare personnel feel the value of what new products provide.

Despite everything, controlling pharmaceutical spending is always a priority of the Government.

We must always think that buying a medicine is an investment, not an expense. For example, for a cancer patient arriving a month later is often a month less of life. Medicines are not expenses, they are the way to change a life and especially in cancer patients for whom the disease was previously a death sentence and now the innovation of Josep Baselga and many other Spanish and international scientists are giving them years and years more of life. I think that when a country sees a company like AstraZeneca as part of the health system, part of science, innovation and the economy, it positions us to address those issues and work together to solve them.

The most economic vision of the industry goes beyond Spain, since the European Union has proposed new pharmaceutical regulations that reduce the duration of patents.

I think we have to work with governments, here in Spain or in Brussels or wherever, to help them understand that when we are limited by patents or the innovation that we have brought to the market, they limit innovation in the long term. And we invest a lot in R&D: in 2003, more than 25% of our global profits, which were $5.9 billion. The group does not communicate sales in Spain, but I can tell you that the investments we make in this country are 30% of our local profits: in clinical trials, in salaries, in collaborations with the health system. These things have to be valued, because the moment we start to set rules that limit or punish innovation we all lose.

However, financial sustainability is the great challenge for public health systems.

Pharmaceutical companies have the responsibility of trying to fix that with the Government and the important thing here is to find the people who want to transform healthcare and find and eliminate the inefficiencies in the system. Because in public health we always look at the pharmacy budget, but we do not know or face all the inefficiencies in the system.

And what measures would you propose? Because in some areas unpopular measures are proposed, such as co-payments.

I believe that each actor has to contribute their part to see how we can evolve the system. I wouldn’t propose co-payments, for example. But one way could be for the manufacturer to guarantee that the drug will work, and if it doesn’t work the company does not charge. There are different avenues for public-private collaboration that can go beyond what we have done with Covid vaccines. What we cannot do is continue looking at the health system, as we have always seen it. We must draw the lessons from the pandemic: that when we sit down and listen to each other we can solve even something that we have never experienced, such as a global pandemic.

Returning to Spain, you have doubled your commitment to the Barcelona innovation center, barely a year after its opening.

Yes, our goal was always to make it one of the largest centers of commercial excellence and clinical innovation in Europe. And we have seen that the great talent that is here, the collaborations we have with both the public and private sectors and the support we have received from local institutions, are making the center evolve at a rapid pace. That, and the confidence we have in Catalonia and Spain, have made us decide to expand it.

What factors were decisive, in your opinion, for AstraZeneca to choose to locate it in Barcelona, ??when many large cities around the world also wanted to host it?

I think there have been three key factors. The first was the relationship we had with Dr. Josep Baselga and all the projects we carried out with the Vall d’Hebron hospital and its oncology research institute, the VHIO, which have turned it into a reference center for the development of our oncology products. When Baselg died, three years ago, AstraZeneca created a consortium with VHIO to maintain his legacy in the long term, and we made a joint investment of 3 million euros to support disruptive projects in cancer treatment and that made us more close to that research ecosystem. And thirdly is the purchase of the Alexion firm, in 2021, which had its Spanish headquarters here in Barcelona. Alexion is a key part for AstraZeneca globally, because it has allowed us to enter rare diseases. It already had its headquarters here, and it was one more reason to continue investing. In any case, all our investments, both in Madrid where we have the headquarters of another R&D hub that collaborates with startups, and in Barcelona, ??are always to support investment in science in the country, which impacts all Spaniards, and with the objective of accelerating patient access to the most innovative treatments.