Partners.
Partners.
Media Partners.
Pharma spends its life trying to change the behaviour of doctors, patients and health systems. Now, pharma is the patient.
The symptoms are familiar: risk aversion, customer abstraction, content overload, slow adoption, weak trust, committee logic, sameness in leadership and a habit of mistaking internal approval for real-world effect. This is an industry built around treatment, evidence and behaviour change, yet it often struggles to treat its own chronic conditions.
Over two days, the audience becomes the team responsible for pharma's recovery. Your job is to examine the symptoms, challenge the lazy diagnoses, identify what is still working and prescribe interventions the patient might actually follow.
In this case, the prognosis depends on the honesty of the consultation and the willingness to accept treatment.
All times are Amsterdam local time (CEST)
From 9am
The first day examines the patient properly. This is not a wellness check or a generic transformation conversation but a serious attempt to distinguish symptoms from causes, failed treatments from promising interventions, and comforting self-diagnosis from clinical reality.
[LEARN]
Paul Simms opens with the patient history: an industry with exceptional science, expertise and resources whose breakthroughs too often produce less adoption, trust and external movement than they should. A discussion on ‘peak science’ and how adoption is the critical component of our industry’s ongoing success.
The audience then chooses where it stands at the beginning of the event:
The audience first positions itself according to its commitment to disruption, then revisits that choice when commitment means being a first mover. Attendees meet someone nearby before the panel begins.
Both positions have a legitimate role. The first group provides urgency. The second forces the event to prove its case.
The audience adds its own experience to the clinical record. The panelists then offer competing diagnoses of the patient’s underlying condition and challenge one another’s evidence. The session ends with three provisional diagnoses that the rest of Day One will investigate.
Panel: Paul Simms, Marc Hennebert, Sjaak Vink, Yariv Hefez, Additional panelist to be announced
[LEARN]
A promising proposition enters the organisation. As it passes through planning, review, alignment and approval, its original force disappears.
The doctors examine where the deterioration occurs. Is the main condition fear, distorted incentives, weak decision rights, excessive process, or an idea that was never strong enough in the first place? The session must identify the moment at which the organisation begins resisting the treatment and prescribe one change capable of preserving the proposition’s force.
Panel: Carlos Eid, Amanda Eckel, Claudia Cramer, Jennifer Villagarcia, Paul Simms
[LEARN]
Pharma has long been urged to integrate — medical, commercial, access, technology, customer engagement. But integration assumes today's functions are the right building blocks. They won't be.
By 2030, leading pharma organisations will organise around the real barriers to impact — diagnostic delay, evidence uncertainty, access friction, clinical inertia — not around departments. Instead of rigid structures, work will form around singular missions, with teams assembled from whatever capabilities are needed, then dissolving once solved.
Functions won't disappear, but they'll stop owning separate strategies. Klick and Oxford PharmaGenesis leaders will argue integration is only an intermediate step — the real shift is making function secondary to the problem.
Host: Paul Simms
Panel: Simon Hackett, Richard White
[LEARN]
Pharma is prescribing AI for almost every condition: slowness, productivity, efficiency, insight, content, personalisation, customer engagement and even creating strategic decisions. But like in medicine, a treatment is only useful if the diagnosis is right. Paul Simms and Michele Barana explore what happens when increasingly capable agents, conversational interfaces and autonomous workflows meet the reality of pharma’s existing operating model. Which problems can AI genuinely treat, which are merely symptoms of deeper organisational conditions, and where could applying more technology simply allow the patient to continue doing the wrong thing faster?
Panel: Paul Simms, Michele Barana
[LEARN]
Pharma is rarely short of research, data, technology or external expertise. But too often the brief arrives with the treatment already chosen. Such as:
This is done before anyone has established precisely what behaviour needs to change, where the current model is failing, what evidence already exists, or whether the organisation has the capability to make the proposed intervention work.
Host: Paul Simms
Panellists: Emma Vitalini, Maria Rigoroso-Brandt and Toby O'Brien
[LEARN]
Panel: Bejal Jayanthan and Chris Thiem
[LEARN]
Pharma is prescribing AI for almost every condition. It is expected to improve insight, accelerate evidence, personalise engagement, reduce costs and increase productivity. But a treatment can also mask symptoms or create new complications.
The doctors examine whether AI is changing the underlying model or simply allowing pharma to produce more content, more analysis and more apparent personalisation without better judgement or stronger relationships.
They must decide:
Host: Paul Simms
Panel: Erasmus Holm, Radhika Bhatia, Yazan Iwidat, Jeff French
Concurrent sessions where commercial and medical teams examine specific conditions within their own operating environments. Each consult must produce a working diagnosis and a possible intervention.
We currently provide more content, less help.
HCPs receive more scientific material than they can absorb. We must determine whether the problem is excessive volume, poor sequence, fragmented evidence or a model that still measures production rather than usefulness.
In order to reduce the information burden, we need to identify what HCPs need to make a choice and define where AI, evidence and human expertise should enter the exchange.
What counts as value when healthcare enters daily life?
Care increasingly happens at home, in pharmacies, through digital services and within ordinary family routines.
The doctors examine where the familiar commercial model stops fitting. If value no longer sits primarily in brand identity and formal customer contact, what should pharma provide instead? The prescription might involve access, infrastructure, service or a different form of practical support, but the panel must make a choice
Facilitators: Amanda Eckel, Baya Ginn, Bettina Maurer, Cara Bunce, Céderic Penny, Claire Baldwin, Esther Smit, James Harper, Katie McMorran, Olivier de Ruelle, Rianne Venema Poot, Sean Mahoney, Shuchi Kumra, Ben Woollard, Carlota Colomer, Claire Cotton, Jonathan Briers, Myles Furnace, Scott Woska, Steve Royle, Richard Cassidy
As AI-generated content becomes more common, people are paying less attention to polished corporate messaging. This session explores what still earns trust, identifies the human qualities AI can't replicate, and develops practical ways to use them more effectively.
Clinical trial data doesn't always reflect how patients behave in the real world, but this gap often goes unnoticed. As a result, medical affairs may build evidence on an incomplete picture. This session identifies where important behaviours or insights are being missed and prioritises one gap to address.
Facilitators: Amanda Eckel, Baya Ginn, Bettina Maurer, Cara Bunce, Céderic Penny, Claire Baldwin, Esther Smit, James Harper, Katie McMorran, Olivier de Ruelle, Rianne Venema Poot, Sean Mahoney, Shuchi Kumra, Ben Woollard, Carlota Colomer, Claire Cotton, Jonathan Briers, Myles Furnace, Scott Woska, Steve Royle, Richard Cassidy
[EXPLORE]
Panellists tell short, candid stories about a moment when they saw an accepted way of working failing and chose to intervene.
Each story must answer four questions:
These should be personal accounts rather than polished company case studies. At least one should involve a change that began below executive level. At least one should include resistance or an incomplete outcome.
The intervention points produced throughout the day are then brought together into a single map. The room can see where treatment repeatedly needs to enter the organisation: during research, strategy, evidence generation, planning, approval, customer interaction, leadership decisions or performance review.
Each table selects one intervention point and writes a handover brief for Day Two:
Hosts: Paul Simms, Jill Donahue
[EXPLORE]
Each attendee identifies the part of the patient they can realistically influence. They also identify the conversation waiting for them when they return to work.
They record three things:
They aren’t asked to design the treatment yet. Day Two gives them more evidence, methods and possible interventions. The point is to ensure that everyone begins Day Two with a real organisational case rather than a hypothetical ambition.
Hosts: Paul Simms, Jill Donahue
From 9am
Yesterday we diagnosed the conditions. Today we treat them. The clinical team now moves from analysis to intervention: what should be prescribed, what should be tested, what should be stopped and what would make the patient actually adhere?
[LEARN]
Host: Paul Simms
Guest: Frank Seo, MediSights
[LEARN]
Brian, a PhD engineer who spent more than 20 years at Procter & Gamble, arrived in pharma to find an industry that spends millions proving its medicines work... and relative peanuts proving its marketing does. Blockbuster medicines are still promoted on myths from the era of Blockbuster Video.
Together with Paul Simms, Brian examines this evidence deficiency by challenging some of pharma’s most trusted commercial beliefs about customers, loyalty and growth. He sets them against the empirical laws behind How Brands Grow, now the basis of marketing at companies such as Unilever, Mondelez and McDonald’s. And discusses their testing across more than 190 medicines. Why is pharma still so slow to act on that evidence? Why do so many marketing decisions rest on opinion rather than proof? Which assumptions would survive a proper examination? And what would first-line treatment look like if marketing had to show it works?
Panel: Paul Simms, Brian Robbins
[LEARN]
Pharma spends heavily on congresses, yet too often the result is simply more content-passing between siloed teams before it finally gets dumped on HCPs. We can do better!
Sourav Ghosh wanted to change that at Boehringer Ingelheim. It was easier said than done, but gives us a shining example of how pharma can seize the initiative. His ambition required global medical teams, therapeutic areas, countries and digital specialists to work around a shared view of the customer experience. It also required the idea to make it through the gauntlet of approvals, politics and organisational resistance that routinely make change slower, safer and smaller.
Together, Sourav and Pierre Metrailler will reconstruct the unvarnished story. What was the real objective? Where did the organisation resist? How did they keep the idea intact? And why was giving visible credit to roughly 300 contributors the masterstroke that helped the organisation own the result? What were the true signs of recovery, and, ultimately, did HCPs receive something more valuable than another pile of stuff?
Panel: Paul Simms, Pierre Metrailler, Sourav Ghosh
[LEARN]
What happens when customers are given something real to react to? Andrew Binns and Paul Simms examine a real life Big Pharma “Judgy” advert as a practical example of a team putting a distinctive idea into the world early enough for customer reaction to affect the work.
The conversation explores the tension that prompted it, the uncertainty the team faced, the internal resistance, the response it provoked and the decisions that changed as a result.
The session introduces Customer Leadership through the case itself: direct exposure to a real tension, a concrete proposition that produces a consequential reaction and leadership willing to act on what it learns.
Host: Paul Simms.
Guest: Andrew Binns, Director, Poke Marketing.
Concurrent treatment-board sessions developing operational interventions within functional lines.
Here we examine how teams can work with customers earlier and more directly, using real tensions and tangible propositions to discover what people will support, resist or help improve. The aim is to identify the incentives, leadership behaviours and decision rights needed for calculated risk to become normal practice rather than an occasional act of bravery.
Intro
Host: Thushani Lovatt
Panel: Georges Dagher, Canan Adams
This session examines how medical can work more directly with HCPs and patients to test emerging ideas, make uncertainty easier to navigate and turn evidence into practical action. The aim is to identify where faster proof, adaptive experimentation and earlier exposure to customer reality can improve decisions while preserving trust and rigour.
Intro
Host: Lucy Osborne
Panel: Kerrianne Clinton, Helen Twiston Davies
Facilitators: Amanda Eckel, Baya Ginn, Bettina Maurer, Cara Bunce, Céderic Penny, Claire Baldwin, Esther Smit, James Harper, Katie McMorran, Olivier de Ruelle, Rianne Venema Poot, Sean Mahoney, Shuchi Kumra, Ben Woollard, Carlota Colomer, Claire Cotton, Jonathan Briers, Myles Furnace, Scott Woska, Steve Royle, Richard Cassidy
This session examines how the function should help identify external potential, shape propositions earlier and build the conditions for adoption at scale. It also considers what becomes more valuable when AI makes conventional content production and personalisation easier.
Intro
Host: Thushani Lovatt
Panel: Davina Lau, Olivia Kager
This session examines how medical should combine agentic AI with human judgement, trusted scientific exchange and stewardship of externally generated innovation. It asks which activities should be automated, where medical expertise becomes more valuable, and how the function maintains authority when it no longer controls the first interpretation of the science.
Intro
Host: Lucy Osborne
Panel: Kishan Rees, Patrick Markt
Facilitators: Amanda Eckel, Baya Ginn, Bettina Maurer, Cara Bunce, Céderic Penny, Claire Baldwin, Esther Smit, James Harper, Katie McMorran, Olivier de Ruelle, Rianne Venema Poot, Sean Mahoney, Shuchi Kumra, Ben Woollard, Carlota Colomer, Claire Cotton, Jonathan Briers, Myles Furnace, Scott Woska, Steve Royle, Richard Cassidy
[LEARN]
Pharma has never had more HCP data, yet it often sits in an echo-chamber, only reinforcing what it wants to hear. Claims, sell-out and prescription data only tell us what happened after the decision. While KOLs, surveys and advisory boards provide answers to the pre-written questions pharma chooses to ask.
Clinical prompts, however, expose what's missing. When a physician or pharmacist asks a spontaneous question at the point of care, in their own words, we see the knowledge gap, hesitation or competing option before the decision has been made, and before it can be cleaned up to 'fit pharma's plan'.
Drawing on real examples across the product lifecycle, Daniela will reveal the questions that formal research failed to anticipate, the assumptions they overruled, and what happened when that evidence was sent to pharma. And based on observation, does pharma even want unfiltered HCP insight? And when the insight disagrees with the strategy, does anything change?
Understand the longer-term implications on GEO, message planning, AI-triggered activations and even the next frontier: the consumer.
Panel: Daniela Seixas
[LEARN]
Pharma is usually good at responding once a new technology, customer behaviour or policy shift becomes impossible to ignore. By then, the organisation is often adapting under pressure. This session looks further ahead. As innovation moves beyond company boundaries, AI changes how evidence is interpreted, field roles are redesigned and public expectations evolve, which capabilities will pharma need before they appear in an annual plan or job description?
The doctors must identify what the industry should begin building now, what familiar capability will lose value and where waiting for stronger evidence would itself become the risk.
Panel: Paul Simms, Emma Statham, Nadjia Drici, Kate Bradford
[LEARN]
A treatment can be approved enthusiastically and still produce no change. It reaches enablement, content, channels, workflows and customer-facing teams, where it is diluted or absorbed into business as usual.
What must happen in the first 30 days after pharma’s new direction is agreed? Where does ownership need to sit? What has to stop? Which operating habit must change first? And how quickly should customers notice the difference? Leaders responsible for sales enablement, omnichannel engagement, scientific communications and HCP experience examine the next decision, and first dose, that we need.
Host: Paul Simms
Panel: Nina Fyhn, Rita Orozco, Sarah Powell
[EXPLORE]
Preparing the outpatient treatment plan. Every attendee returns to the real organisational case recorded at the end of Day One. They select one intervention from the event and turn it into a short internal proposal. It must explain what has changed in their understanding, what the organisation should try, what decision is required and what evidence will show whether the intervention is working.
Attendees then form accountability pods. Each person presents the proposal to their pod, receives a challenge and plans the first conversation they will have after the event.
Host: Paul Simms
Gabriel de Paula Director of Operations (Events & Community) | Pharmageddon Europe Event Leader
Partners.
Media 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.
