Interview: The glass is half full

Published: 4-Sep-2014

Kieran Murphy, President and CEO of GE Healthcare Life Sciences, talks to Susan Birks about global trends in biopharmaceuticals, precision medicines and diagnostics

There are not many areas in healthcare and life science that Kieran Murphy is not involved in. Leading GE Healthcare Life Sciences for the past three years, he has been driving the growing $4bn business that provides a broad range of technologies and services to companies that are active in, among other things, drug discovery, pre-clinical and clinical development and biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

It is a business that has expanded rapidly, most recently acquiring Thermo Fisher’s HyClone cell culture media and sera, gene modulation and magnetic beads businesses. And the company is not averse to more acquisitions that fit its aim of offering ‘end-to-end’ technologies for cell biology research, cell therapy and for the manufacture of innovative biological medicines and vaccines.

A down-to-earth businessman with Irish roots, Murphy has been involved in biology, food and microbiology through-out his life. Brought up on a small dairy farm, he chose to study science and started his career in animal health. He joined from filtration products company Whatman when it was acquired by GE Healthcare Life Sciences in 2008, having held several positions in pharma companies, including Janssen Pharmaceutical, Mallinckrodt and Novartis’ vaccines division.

His dairy farming roots taught him both resourcefulness and resilience, he says – two qualities that have proved useful in heading up GE Healthcare’s diverse life sciences business. Split into five business units – BioProcessing, Research, Medical Imaging, In Vitro Diagnostics, and Services – the Life Sciences arm encompasses some 20 manufacturing sites and 10,000 employees around the globe.

GE Healthcare, a unit of the huge General Electric Company, has the mission statement ‘to deliver better healthcare to more people at lower cost’ and Murphy believes it is an interesting time to be involved in drug discovery. ‘There are huge opportunities for pharma, especially in the immunology area for cancer, that will see fantastic treatments coming through in the next few years.’

Part of the solution for the pharma industry is being able to stratify the population and identify at an early stage who will benefit

He is also a believer in stratified medicine. His optimism is, however, balanced with an awareness that pharma manufacturing systems, infrastructure and processes have to change. ‘Part of the solution for the pharma industry – which is now tasked with producing lower-volume products at reasonable cost – is being able to stratify the population and identify at an early stage who will benefit, and then manufacture in volumes that will still be economic, i.e. using disposable technologies or mini or micro factories.

‘The challenge is that whereas in the past stratified therapies were sold at high prices, governments in future won’t pay very high prices – so how can the industry develop niche products at a reasonable cost that can be sold at a reasonable price?’

With a ‘glass half-full’ outlook, Murphy sees new opportunities where many would see only challenges: ‘Late-stage failures are clearly bad news for the pharma industry, so any technologies that can be deployed to weed out the poorer candidates earlier in development from an efficacy or toxicity standpoint must be good for the industry. This is one of the areas where we want to help pharma,’ he says.

Any technologies that can be deployed to weed out the poorer candidates earlier in development from an efficacy or toxicity standpoint must be good for the industry

He sees the growing success of biotherapeutics and the need for more local manufacturing of therapy products as key trends. ‘There is a great opportunity to deliver manufacturing solutions more locally – such as mAbs or insulin in China, blood plasma to the Middle East – that opportunity is possible because of the change in manufacturing technologies and the availability of solutions such as KUBio,’ he says.

KUBio is the company’s cGMP-compliant facility and process solution designed to provide companies with the ability to rapidly build biopharma production capacity in a prefabricated style.

Murphy sees the change in attitude within some countries to the current practice of shipping and importing drugs as a major driving force behind such products. ‘Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China want to be more self sufficient, and that will come about when they can produce these [drug products] on a more local basis,’ he suggests.

He says the combination of disposable technologies and software for precise monitoring and control of processes now available ‘would never have been possible when the products were being produced in 20,000L stainless steel tanks’.

‘When you look at some of the bigger issues, such as vaccines in Africa, there is no question that the ability to provide fill-finish locally in some of these markets will radically change the economics of treating populations,’ he adds.

Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China want to be more self sufficient, and that will come about when they can produce these drug products on a more local basis

He believes GE’s experience in providing infrastructure for the biologics industry and delivering tools to industrialise and standardise processes gives it an ideal basis for supplying to this sector. ‘This is home ground for GE, who have been working with Lean, Six Sigma and providing productivity solutions for big industries such as aviation, oil, gas and energy. We can bring new technologies and industrial processes into the healthcare industry in a better way than other companies in this space.’

The company’s drive to help business adapt to change is not only focused on developing regions. GE is also looking to help the US manage changes brought about by the implementation of Obamacare as well as the shift to ‘population health management’. The latter will see companies that currently supply hospitals or health providers on a ‘fee-for-service’ basis move to ‘shared-risk population health models’ that reward financial and quality outcomes. This will require greater use of large patient datasets to help identify and group patients within a population according to risk and likelihood that they will need an intervention.

‘Population health management is a big trend in the US. The hospital system in the country will consolidate into bigger groups that will be given charge to manage populations rather than be paid for every procedure they carry out...We are gearing up to help hospitals manage that change.’ As an example, he cites the joint venture with Caradigm, which aims to help ensure the health system is better connected to manage the health of populations.

‘We are also working closely with the NHS to ensure we can link data on populations and to help understand patterns of disease, which has to be a good thing... and the UK is in a good position to manage this going forward.’

Diagnostics

Already a leading provider in the sphere of contrast and imaging agents for disease diagnosis, GE Healthcare Life Sciences is now building on that offering with new molecular pathology and cellular analysis. Its pathology platform, called MultiOmyx, for example, developed following the acquisition of Clarient Diagnostic Services, can analyse tumour samples on a cellular level by studying the expression of more than 175 different proteins and disease markers per cell. This enables researchers to create a ‘digital map’ of the tumour and allows for a clear graphic representation of protein expression.

Reimbursement of diagnosis has to keep pace with these technologies and we do face challenges with that today

The platform has also led to the development of a nine biomarker test for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that can give a more precise diagnosis of the disease. ‘Technologies [such as this] allow you to go from an organ to a tissue, to looking at the cell and the biomarker profile within cells and protein expression. That’s the direction of travel, and matched with ever more powerful sequencing, it will allow the diagnostics industry to become a lot more powerful in the next few years,’ says Murphy.

There is no doubt that GE has the stature to acquire more exciting diagnosis technologies in the future, but that future is not without challenges. When the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) changed the reimbursement policy for diagnostics, for example, it had an impact on diagnostic businesses in general.

‘Reimbursement of diagnosis has to keep pace with these technologies and we do face challenges with that today,’ says Murphy. ‘To put it bluntly, it is quite difficult for a pure diagnostic player to see the benefit of some of these tests, compared with some of the pharmaceutical companies that have a diagnostics arm,’ he adds.

The successful development of companion diagnostics will only happen with the successful collaboration of pharma companies and diagnostic businesses

‘Diagnostic imaging will always be a big business but in vitro diagnostics is a tougher route. But we continue to make big investment and work closely with the pharma industry because if we collaborate with the sector and deliver our power in diagnostics with the power of the therapy companies, we will be in a much better position to deliver precision therapies.’

‘In future, more and more therapies will have to have a companion diagnostic and the successful development of companion diagnostics will only happen with the successful collaboration of pharma companies and diagnostic businesses like ourselves,’ he adds.

Managing data is another area where industry needs to foster greater collaboration to do a better job, he believes: ‘Improving the linkage between the different modalities of diagnosis – linking imaging to molecular pathology and response to therapy – if we can do a better job of data management that will be a game-changer in future.’

In fact, he sees collaboration in all areas as key: ‘Having a collaborative style is an absolutely critical success factor in today’s operating environment... To provide good solutions for customers, all of us have to collaborate to get things right.’

Curriculum Vitae
2011 to presentPresident and CEO, GE Healthcare Life Sciences
2009 to 2010Global Commercial Leader, GE Healthcare Life Sciences
2007 to 2008CEO, Whatman
2005 to 2007CEO, Innovata
2003 to 2004CEO, Adprotech
2000 to 2001CEO, Animal Vaccines, Novartis
1998 to 2000CEO, Vericore
1995 to 1997General Manager, Mallinckrodt
Education
1987 to 1988MSc Business, University of Manchester
1980 to 1984BSc, University College Dublin

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