Axtria brings together the industry’s most influential innovators
Axtria Ignite 2024 is in the books! What an incredible two days in beautiful Princeton, New Jersey, as some of the most brilliant minds in life sciences joined forces. More than 350 senior participants from over 65 of the world’s top pharmaceutical and LS organizations were in attendance. Each brought countless sparks of imagination!
Axtria Ignite enabled the exchange of innovative ideas, fostered collaboration in our industry, and shared state-of-the-art discussions in patient engagement, rare and orphan commercialization, artificial intelligence, GenAI, IRA and regulation, customer-centricity, omnichannel orchestration, digitally augmented field force, and more.
Attendees shared their successes, their misses, their hopes, and their challenges. We kicked things off with a message about looking for the special “sparks” of innovation.
Data and Artificial Intelligence: Here, we learned how ‘responsible AI’ can help solve problems, but we will always need a human in the loop to get a solution to the final mile. Leaders from some of the largest life sciences companies shared how AI and GenAI are going mainstream, and how AI-driven gains for pharma companies are now projected to reach a quarter of a trillion dollars. After years of experimentation, the industry is pivoting to industrialization efforts, including scaling LLMs. In other sessions, patient data across the value chain and what product managers and sales leaders expect from AI were the focus.
Next Era Commercialization: The sessions focused on providing a guide to a successful commercial digital transformation and how to evolve into customer engagement models to achieve greater customer centricity. A key takeaway that could apply to any situation in life sciences was to break down silos. One of the panels discussed the true patient 360 journey and shared an example of a single patient journey that had too many separate studies: one by a commercial team, a medical team, a regulatory team, and more. The panel emphasized: stick together and get on the same page. In another session, we discussed how commercial models need to transform to adapt to the new era of drugs to effectively serve patients in rare and orphan and cell and gene therapeutic areas.
Customer Engagement: This featured fascinating discussions on who the true “customer” is in the industry - unraveling a way to navigate and effectively engage with providers, institutions/IDNs, payers, PBMs/pharmacies, and, most importantly, patients. A comprehensive set of best practices was shared to enable omnichannel customer engagement, including enablement of augmented reps and how that can make the field force more effective. Later, a session shared that early adopters are the key to driving peer advocacy for a treatment. The track also looked at ways to drive next-generation patient engagement. Panelists shared that a true next-gen patient experience is less about checking boxes and more about creating meaningful opportunities to engage with patients. Relationships with patients should not be a transaction, and providers must acknowledge how the patients’ illnesses affect them emotionally.
Unlocking Value with GenAI and AI-Based Software: This provided a look at our inter-connected suite of best-in-class software and how it is transforming life sciences commercialization by embracing AI + GenAI across Axtria DataMAx™, Axtria InsightsMAx™, Axtria MarketingIQ™, Axtria SalesIQ™, and Axtria CustomerIQ™. Presenters shared some practical applications of AI+ GenAI that have brought real-world value to top life sciences companies and have made these solutions ideal for both US and global scaling.
With all tracks completed, it was time to honor some of the game-changers in the industry who are making strides in the field.
Mainstage was buzzing as our six inaugural Axtria Ignite Leadership Award honorees were announced: Steve Winawer of Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Cary Anne Schockemoehl of GSK, Ashish Sharma of Novartis, Abhishek Narayan Singh of Merck, Chitra Narasimhachari of Gilead Sciences, and Arvind Balasundaram of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Our final mainstage panel of the day focused on the evolution of life sciences commercialization and AI. Our panel discussed how “Augmented Intelligence” can be defined as input, impact, and the ability to interpret, and how we need to change the discussion in the future from “structured” and “unstructured” data to “useful” and “not useful” content.
Thanks to everyone who attended! It’s now on to next year!