COVID-19 Brings Change, Signaling the End of ‘Business-as-Usual’ for Life Sciences
In October 2020 Dr. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley and her French research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, were awarded the Nobel Laureate for Chemistry. Dr. Doudna’s success story is one of broad, inclusive thinking and processes, and provides an exciting symbol for change within life sciences and beyond. It’s the kind of change the COVID-19 pandemic has driven in the field.
As a researcher, Dr. Doudna has a personal and unique approach to science. Her career has been driven by curiosity since childhood, which has removed the distinction between basic science and humanities, and casts her work in the light of a more human experience.
Dr. Doudna’s discovery of CRISPR in 2013 is a dramatic story of a race to publish. Feng Zhang, gene-editing researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, published the same findings just weeks ahead of her, and the final decision on who won—and who gets to keep the potentially very valuable patents that hang in the balance— is still being contested.
However, both scientists are setting aside their battle in response to COVID-19, to develop means to detect and protect against the virus. They’ve agreed to release all discoveries to the public domain to help further the fight against the pandemic. Feng Zhang announced his effort with this Tweet. The recently released Pfizer-BioNTech COVID Vaccine is based on the virus’s genetic instructions.
In Dr. Doudna’s story, and with others, we can see how COVID-19 has driven change in organizations and government agencies in the US and around the world. There is general agreement that these events are spurring big positive shifts in the traditional drug development process, through transparency and collaboration, to accelerate the pace.
And with those changes come waves of new challenges. We think that, now more than ever, the business of life science can benefit from outside expertise, from real estate brokers and other service companies and experts that bring new perspectives and creative ideas. It’s no longer enough to have lifelong exclusive industry credentials. New blood is needed for change, with creative thinking, collaboration and problem solving as the requisites that can help the field as it advances. Here are some of the areas where we expect new thinking and innovation to be valuable:
Virtual
In response to social distance restrictions, the use of technology has enabled virtual workplaces and work processes in countless ways, becoming the adaptive backbone of business during COVID-19. Now, to continue increasing their productivity, tenants require robust and reliable technical infrastructure that supports virtual work in offices, labs and remote work environments.
Distributed
Redundancy—through backups and alternative, parallel facilities—reduce risk and provide safety measures against possible disruption, for life sciences companies that are readying products for commercialization. In addition to creating distributed location strategies for safety, geographic redundancy can also provide greater access to clusters, markets, cultures and communities to attract more diverse talent.
Agile
Agility begins with flexibility and flex office lease structures can provide a variety of new ways for tenants to obtain space for their changing and growing needs. This is, in a way, an administrative extension of a core competency of life science companies, who frequently adapt scientific research by commercializing molecules and compounds for markets that were undreamt of at the start of the research process. And when the line of sight in development changes, so do all the company's lab, office and other business needs. This is where the right real estate partners can shine.
Talent
Increasingly, as with nearly every other industry, life sciences companies are battling for talent. To get a leg up, they are beginning to look for ways to cater to the personal interests of their talent pool, and to create the means to meet them where and how they want to work and live. Real estate brokers, developers and marketers are well-suited to be able help companies match company cultures with their facilities, locations and amenities, to make labs and offices more experience-driven.
Collaboration
For life science organizations, connecting to clusters, both virtually and physically, is essential for funding and development. Real estate brokers are in a unique position to provide data to life sciences companies about where the emerging clusters are, and locations ideally suited for access to research partners in universities and hospitals, incubators, private equity, suppliers to the industry, government organizations and others.
Speed
With the disruptions of the past twelve months, there is a new emphasis on speed in life science. As always the priority is the science and proving pathways to commercialization, but just as the COVID vaccine development process has opened the door to greater transparency and collaboration across the industry, it has also accelerated the pace of development. Life science companies need responsive partners and research-ready facilities to keep moving at the new speed of research, as well as anticipating the shifting and evolving centers of clusters where the greatest resources will be concentrated.
Stakeholders
Startups are being spun out of the labs of big pharma companies and universities in an increasingly more open environment. These institutions support and value the independent thinkers in their midst, understanding that this is the wellspring of innovation that in various ways has the potential to come back to power new products and create future value for large institutions. To take further advantage of this, brokers leasing lab space are widening their net of communication, to reach university research directors, chief scientists in big pharma companies and stay in front and top of mind.
Communication
The solution that can link all these components of change together is communication. It starts with understanding what stakeholders value, translating and clarifying those ideas into messages, then reaching the right audiences to inform them about new concepts, and more.
The current and COVID —and hopefully soon-to-be past—environment has sparked change in the life sciences industry in many exciting ways, and will call upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness of many stakeholders to take full advantage.