Partners.
Partners.
The first act sets out the case for the prosecution. It hypothesises that pharma’s problem isn’t a shortage of effort, intelligence or evidence, but habits that make our industry logical yet strangely ineffective at moving people. Our audience, or jury, is asked to listen carefully to the arguments and prepare its verdict.
The session opens as a live indictment. Our panel lays out the case against the current model: an industry that’s fluent in positioning, obsessed with process and still too often unable to create change. It sets the terms for the rest of the event: in this courtroom, ideas do not get to hide in a theoretical, rose-tinted limbo. They’re put under pressure and forced to fight for their survival.
Every company claims to want fresh thinking. Yet every large company has a remarkably effective system for making it presentable, explainable, compliant… and dead. This session puts the murder weapon on the table: career risk, committee logic, over-sanded language, performative alignment, the preference for ideas that win meetings rather than win real influence. How can we allow the kind of organisation that says it wants provocation, then rewards the employees who edit it out?
If only pharma’s problem was confined to just killing bold suggestions! But really, it rarely produces propositions audacious enough to deserve a real reaction. Most offers are variants of the same familiar formula: more support, better education, improved engagement, extra services wrapped around a stubborn model. This session asks what genuinely dangerous propositions might look like: offers and moves bold enough to provoke HCPs, patients and systems into revealing what they would actually follow, resist, reject or help build. If the industry wants to evolve, it’ll need to start testing propositions with real teeth.
Pharma uses the word ‘customer’, yet often hides the human behind abstractions: HCP segment, persona, KOL, DOL, target, decision-maker, influence map. In this session, we examine the alternative. What happens when the person at the end of the chain is treated as a real character rather than a category? Witnesses from retail, hospitality, campaigning and health systems join industry voices to explore how other sectors design for people who can ignore, resist, switch, organise or walk away.
What happens when an industry that needs scientific rigour in one part of its work uses fake-world certainty in another? Everything from clinical trials to the hubris of the marketing manager is based on an approximation of real conditions. We claim to be data-driven yet ignore the truth behind human behaviour. We look at the difference between the logic of medicine and the psycho-logic of humanity. Between what people say in managed settings and what they do in public, under real friction.
What happens if forward-thinking minds from other industries are asked to take on pharma? Think political campaign architects, luxury operators, platform builders, entertainment commissioners, somebody who understands fandom better than engagement. Not because we want gimmicks from unrelated sectors, but because it can be useful to hear outsiders describe, with uncomfortable clarity, how desire, attention, permission and identity actually move in the real world, and why pharma so often mistakes information delivery for impact.
Now the trial gets serious. In our second act, we stop admiring problems and start testing propositions. At points, the court will divide into parallel hearings: first into commercial and medical chambers, then later into precedent-setting cases and working orders. These are not blue-sky fantasies or superficial “future of pharma” talking points. They are bolder, stranger and more usable ideas, some already emerging around us, others pushed further here so we can see what they demand of us before it is too late. A good cross-examination doesn’t flatter the witness: it exposes what’s true, what’s weak and what needs to change.
Pharma still behaves as if the decisive moments happen in formal, institutional settings: the appointment, the rep interaction, the PSP. But more and more of the real action now happens elsewhere: at home, in pharmacy, community, digital triage, social media and in places shaped by family life rather than institutional convenience. This session asks what happens when healthcare shifts from the hospital corridor to the patient’s actual world. Home-health operators, pharmacists, community-care leaders and pharma voices explore the new map and how we work in it.
HCPs want our drugs, expertise and services, but do they want all the corporate pharma shenanigans that come along with it? What if one of pharma’s proudest assets has now become a liability? Here we examine whether the brand, at least in its familiar commercial form, is always an engine of growth, or whether in some categories it has become an expensive barrier placed between people and value. We look at the possibility that future differentiation may sit less in identity decoration and more in infrastructure, access, usefulness and belief.
Prevention is one of pharma’s favourite noble words. Increasingly it is in our stated desires. This session puts it under financial cross-examination. If prevention is to become more than worthy rhetoric, it has to survive contact with incentives, budgets, timelines, politics and ownership. We bring together insurers, employers, public health, diagnostics and pharma to test what business models might actually make prevention commercially serious. Either it earns its place, or it remains a well-dressed aspiration.
Everyone thinks AI will finish what digital started, turning pharma’s field force into an expensive relic of yesteryear. But what if the opposite happens? In a market flooded with AI-driven communication, the best interactions may become more valuable precisely because they aren’t fake. This session explores the idea that reps, MSLs and other customer-facing humans could regain strategic importance, regaining human trust in a world dominated by machine-created content and comms. Not as nostalgic holdovers but as premium signals of ownership, judgement and respect.
Enough about efficiency. This hearing asks a harder question: what kind of commercial, marketing and medical organisation should AI actually produce? Instead of treating AI as an add-on to current workflows, the session puts the model itself under examination. Which parts of the old system should disappear because they are repetitive residue from a cheaper era of production? Which parts become more strategic precisely because machines can now generate, summarise and personalise at scale? And, crucially, which human roles gain value again because in a world flooded with fluent, plausible content, trust, judgement and ownership become more rather than less important?
Wrap-around services are compassionate, differentiated and strategically essential. But are they? Are they true engines of better outcomes, or beautifully staged reassurances that flatter the sponsor more than they help the patient? Let’s assess the growing patient-service universe with a harder eye. Do we really need pharma to spearhead obesity care, adherence programmes, psychometrics, community support, caregiver burden? When does support become substance, when does it become performance and who gets to decide?
We’ve known for years that the most revealing health signals in modern life do not emerge from a trial site, a doctor visit or an annual test. They come from minute-by-minute rings, watches, routines, drop-offs, sleep, stress, movement, conversation and other small behavioural traces left behind. The latest generation of tools have been adopted and are relied on by a generation; are we now underestimating not just consumer data but the whole category of lived evidence? We’ll explore where passive data becomes meaningful without being intrusive, and what a more adult relationship with wearables might look like.
The final act decides not which ideas were interesting or which panellists were compelling, but which propositions are guilty of gross misappropriation in modern pharma. What survives scrutiny and what feels like flimsy gimmickry? It’s time for the trial to stop being intellectual and become informative. Some will be acquitted. Some sent away for retrial. Some convicted.
Misinformation isn’t just a comms problem. It has become part of the market itself: faster, cheaper, more targeted and often more emotionally effective than pharma’s (or anyone’s) official response. This session seeks answers when healthcare enters a world where truth competes on unequal terms, authority no longer guarantees belief and the first convincing voice often wins. Taking vaccines as our case, we’ll examine where pharma helps, where it hinders, and what kind of role the industry can realistically play when the fight is not about facts but over trust, speed and ease of message.
Pharma loves blaming compliance for its lack of imagination or influence, often as a convenient way of avoiding a harder truth. But most teams aren’t constrained by the rulebook, but by their own learned timidity. If anything, necessity is the mother of invention and the boundaries give us direction. This session calls legal, regulatory, medical and commercial voices into the same panel, not as opposing counsel but as co-designers of more robust propositions. Not simply rebellious posturing, but what ideas are valuable enough to be back on the table.
Not every good trial ends with a clean verdict. This session brings in the people whose reactions actually matter: patients, clinicians, operators from outside pharma, all of whom have observed proceedings. Not to provide a sentimental “voice of the customer” but to deliberate on the strongest propositions and expose where the room is still flattering itself. Are we still guilty of proposals that sound thrilling on stage but are dead on arrival in the outside world?
Rather than the usual broad optimism and vague calls to action, it’s time to cast a verdict and determine a sentence. Some propositions are acquitted and deserve scale and a serious next life. Some are convicted as cosmetic, self-entitled or disconnected from reality. Others are sent for retrial: not abandoned, but redesigned as bounded experiments or better-aimed provocations. In the end, whatever the verdict, In the end, this trial has failed unless we are willing to pass judgment and leave with more than opinion. We need to agree on what must change and to hold ourselves accountable.
Gabriel de Paula Director of Operations (Events & Community) | Pharmageddon Europe Event Leader
Partners.
Thanks for being keen to join us in Amsterdam.
Our intention is to have one non-affiliated ‘patient’ for each team taking part.
If you are interested in being one of these, please write to us. We also have a limited number of spaces for HCPs, media and others. Please write to Gabriel on [email protected] or [email protected] if eager to take part.
