About Big Pharma Sharma (BPS)
Why a Substack?
I launched the facetiously named “Big Pharma Sharma” to fill what I saw as a key gap in the voices that cover the biopharma industry. Our sector has strong analytical coverage from a variety of different viewpoints, most prominently, sell-side analysts, science journalists, industry reporters, traders, and VCs. All of these parties bring unique perspectives to the table and all are worth reading. However, having been an industry veteran for 10+ years now and consuming the content of primarily these voices, I’ve found that they never fully resonated with the strategic questions my colleagues and I were trying to answer inside the conference room. This made clear to me that the voice of the industry insider, someone who has wrestled with strategy-shaping questions and dissected complex business problems at the corporate, portfolio, and product levels, was sorely missing. This is the voice that I hope Big Pharma Sharma (BPS) can add volume to.
What content will BPS have?
I am hoping this substack serves as a go-to source for Biopharma industry analysis, insights, and ideas. If you’ve been a colleague of mine in the past, you know I like to dive deep into novel technologies, markets, major catalysts, data readouts, and transactions, and connect the dots between these things without losing sight of the “so what?”. I’m hoping to publish posts on this substack look and feel a bit different than maybe what you’re used to from other sources. I endeavor for this to be highly impactful, with concise and memorable summaries, takeaways, insights, and implications, while also having sections that are more detailed for those who want to dive deeper. I’m also a very visually oriented person and believe a picture or slide can say so much more about a topic than paragraphs of text, so wherever possible, I hope to supplement my posts with graphics, figues, diagrams, and frameworks to elevate the impact of my work on your day-to-day needs.
As of now I’m aiming to have a few different post types, but this will likely evolve over time:
News Alerts: this is where I will breakdown major data readouts, deals, and other key catalysts in the industry
Conference Coverage: here I will aim to highlight key data that are expected at major medical meetings (pre-conference) and dissect these data (post-conference)
Deep Dives: this is where I will synthesize competitive landscapes, launch timelines, product/technology profiles within indications and technologies of interest.
Ideas: here is where I will put my corporate strategy hat on and connect the dots between disparate trends that may be sub-salient. With this flavor of post I hope to highlight novel strategic avenues, predict key decisions companies are debating inside their walls, pontificate on potential M&A, illustrate new angles on emerging trends, and raise awareness to emerging opportunities.
Why me?
I’ve been working in Biopharma strategy over a 10+ year career across multiple roles as a consultant, inside the walls of Big Pharma at Gilead, and at a small biotech company. You can checkout my linkedin profile here. I cut my teeth as a CI professional, mastering how to consume, organize, and synthesize massive amounts of information from a variety of sources and connecting the dots between these data points to define the impact to my company’s strategy. I’ve helped shape the business cases for major strategic maneuvers at Gilead, most notably its decision to move into cell therapy with the acquisition of Kite Pharma. I’ve worked directly with the C-suite to diagnose and treat organizational operating issues, redefine corporate strategy, build the strategic plan for novel products, and lead cross functional teams to solve ambiguous business problems. Combining my strategy consulting and BioPharma experience, I have worked across a wide array of therapeutic areas: psychiatry, neurology, rare disease, cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, virology, autoimmune, and most deeply in oncology. My work experience has also spanned across modalities, touching the realms of small molecules, antibody-based therapies, vaccines, gene editing, and most notably cell therapy.