What are the key takeaways from this GEN Podcasts episode?

Key insights include: **Collaboration velocity:** During COVID-19, the industry recorded over 90 partnerships in a single year — a volume that previously took roughly two decades to accumulate. Policymakers and companies should use this benchmark to set baseline collaboration targets for future health preparedness planning.; **Supply chain resilience:** No country achieves 100% biopharmaceutical self-sufficiency, and pursuing it ties up capital inefficiently. Instead, regions should map critical dependencies across the full supply chain and build redundancy through multi-country partnerships rather than isolated domestic manufacturing expansion.; **Emerging market strategy:** Saudi Arabia bypassed the common "import bulk, finish locally" model by building an end-to-end innovation ecosystem before the pandemic hit. Emerging markets should prioritize full-process technology transfer and domestic IP ownership over last-step manufacturing to reduce external dependency.

What did Jorge Estrada and Peter Pitts discuss on GEN Podcasts?

A panel of biotech and pharma experts from Latin America, The Gulf, and Europe examines how pandemic-era collaboration models — spanning academia, government, and industry — can reshape emerging markets' biomanufacturing capabilities post-COVID. Key topics include: **Collaboration velocity:** During COVID-19, the industry recorded over 90 partnerships in a single year — a volume that previously took roughly two decades to accumulate. Policymakers and companies should use this benchmark to set baseline collaboration targets for future health preparedness planning.; **Supply chain resilience:** No country achieves 100% biopharmaceutical self-sufficiency, and pursuing it ties up capital inefficiently. Instead, regions should map critical dependencies across the full supply chain and build redundancy through multi-country partnerships rather than isolated domestic manufacturing expansion..

How long is this episode of GEN Podcasts?

This episode is 18 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

GEN Podcasts

Emerging Markets Collaborate to Succeed in Post-Pandemic World

April 11, 2023

18 min episode · 2 min read

Jorge Estrada,Peter Pitts,Jeff Kombrikos

Episode

18 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Health & Wellness, Relationships, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Published Mar 15, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Collaboration velocity: During COVID-19, the industry recorded over 90 partnerships in a single year — a volume that previously took roughly two decades to accumulate. Policymakers and companies should use this benchmark to set baseline collaboration targets for future health preparedness planning.
✓Supply chain resilience: No country achieves 100% biopharmaceutical self-sufficiency, and pursuing it ties up capital inefficiently. Instead, regions should map critical dependencies across the full supply chain and build redundancy through multi-country partnerships rather than isolated domestic manufacturing expansion.
✓Emerging market strategy: Saudi Arabia bypassed the common "import bulk, finish locally" model by building an end-to-end innovation ecosystem before the pandemic hit. Emerging markets should prioritize full-process technology transfer and domestic IP ownership over last-step manufacturing to reduce external dependency.
✓Health literacy as policy priority: Vaccine misinformation spread partly because populations lack foundational health literacy. Policymakers should treat public science education as a core component of any health technology rollout strategy, not an afterthought, to protect the value of innovation investment.

What It Covers

A panel of biotech and pharma experts from Latin America, The Gulf, and Europe examines how pandemic-era collaboration models — spanning academia, government, and industry — can reshape emerging markets' biomanufacturing capabilities post-COVID.

Key Questions Answered

•Collaboration velocity: During COVID-19, the industry recorded over 90 partnerships in a single year — a volume that previously took roughly two decades to accumulate. Policymakers and companies should use this benchmark to set baseline collaboration targets for future health preparedness planning.
•Supply chain resilience: No country achieves 100% biopharmaceutical self-sufficiency, and pursuing it ties up capital inefficiently. Instead, regions should map critical dependencies across the full supply chain and build redundancy through multi-country partnerships rather than isolated domestic manufacturing expansion.
•Emerging market strategy: Saudi Arabia bypassed the common "import bulk, finish locally" model by building an end-to-end innovation ecosystem before the pandemic hit. Emerging markets should prioritize full-process technology transfer and domestic IP ownership over last-step manufacturing to reduce external dependency.
•Health literacy as policy priority: Vaccine misinformation spread partly because populations lack foundational health literacy. Policymakers should treat public science education as a core component of any health technology rollout strategy, not an afterthought, to protect the value of innovation investment.

Notable Moment

A panelist noted that when Shanghai locked down during COVID, the U.S. faced an acute shortage of contrast agents — illustrating how a single disruption in an unrelated region can cascade into critical medical supply failures domestically.

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Episode Transcript

Welcome to Gencast, a sponsored podcast series brought to you by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. I'm your host, Jeff Pugaliskis. Welcome everyone to this new episode of Gencast where we're gonna continue our discussion into collaborative endeavors across the biotech and pharma industries with some particular attention to how some emerging markets across the globe are handling these efforts. Now we dove into this subject in some previously related podcasts, the links for which are on the gen website at genengnews.com/mlab. So make sure you check out all that great content. Today, we have a diverse array of thought leaders that are part of our podcast panel. So let's go ahead and meet them, shall we? Panel, if you could tell the general audience a little bit about yourselves, that'd be great. Hello, Jeff. I am Jorge Estrada, the head of customer applications team in process solutions at MilliporeSigma responsible for Latin America. Thanks for having us. Hi. This is Peter Pitts. I'm the president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a visiting professor at the University of Paris School of Medicine, and I'm a former FDA associate commissioner. Glad to be here. Hi. I'm Jeff Kombrikos. I'm principal at BioPharma Vision Advisors. And in recent years, I've led the government affairs, teams, for GSK and MSD in the Gulf Region. Hi. I'm Anissa Bomlich. I'm a biomanufacturing strategy and market expert in directing one of the business line of, bioprocessing unit at Millipore Sigma. Well, panel, thanks so much for introducing yourselves. We really appreciate it, and welcome to this Gencast. So let's dive into the, first question that we have for all of you. And it's kind of an interesting one, and, again, it kind of starts everything off really well, for this conversation. So the question I have is, what kind of collaboration did we see during the pandemic that we wouldn't have normally witnessed outside the context of a global crisis. Yeah. I think that's the great lesson learned from COVID nineteen, which is when the entire ecosystem pulls in the same direction, and by that, I mean, not just pharmaceutical industry and government, but academia, patient groups, pharmacists, health care providers. When we all pull in the same direction, we can accomplish amazing things very fast. And if we can put that collaborative mindset towards other disease states, we will have come out of COVID nineteen with a very valuable lesson. Yeah. I'd pick up on that, Jeff, pick up on Peter's point. I think we saw globally, companies announcing all kinds of manufacturing and r and d partnerships. So this kind of proved that companies could could compete fiercely, but also could collaborate fiercely. At the local level, that is the regional country level, I think we also saw an unmatched level of collaboration typically through the trade associations where, the companies would would collectively brief the, officials, policymakers on scientific medical progress against the pandemic and also try …

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