The Power of Partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem: how can Biopharma take the lead?
4 min read 30 April 2025
The healthcare ecosystem encompasses a diverse range of organisations that deliver products and services at local, regional, and global levels to enhance health outcomes. Each organisation brings its own knowledge, skills, and capabilities but shares a common goal: providing high-quality and affordable healthcare.
However, achieving this goal is becoming increasingly challenging due to factors such as the growing burden of managing long-term chronic conditions and the rising complexity in handling co-morbidities. These shifts ultimately increase costs and exacerbate the challenges faced by healthcare workforce shortages1.
To address these challenges, stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem must look beyond traditional boundaries and form strategic healthcare partnerships to meet the complex needs of populations.
As key players, Biopharma organisations are well-positioned to play a bigger role in supporting this broader ecosystem. By leveraging their skilled workforces and innovative capabilities, they can help manage the risks, complexities, and opportunities associated with delivering new healthcare solutions to populations.
Despite the clear benefits of strategic partnering across the healthcare ecosystem, over 60% of strategic healthcare partnerships have been reported as failed or failing2. Our experience, supported by research, identifies the following challenges3:
- Healthcare systems, structures, governance and funding are not set up well to support strategic partnering. This creates a challenging environment for Biopharma to effectively partner at scale
- Misaligned visions, goals and motivations can perpetuate scepticism about the Biopharma industry’s role in delivering quality outcomes for populations
- Limited investment in developing partnering skills and capabilities across players within the ecosystem, leading to challenges in driving operational excellence across healthcare partnerships
In this article, we explore the Biopharma axis with three key players in this ecosystem: Government, Academia, and Not-For-Profit organisations. We examine how these challenges across the strategic partnership lifecycle can be effectively navigated in practice to set up and operationalise these healthcare ecosystem partnerships for success.
Biopharma & Healthcare Ecosystem partnering success: examples and our key get-rights
Partnering with Government to deliver innovative health interventions at pace and scale
A key role of Biopharma within the healthcare ecosystem is the sponsorship and delivery of clinical trials, to bring novel life-changing therapies to patients. Traditionally, infrastructural hurdles have compounded the operational complexities in conducting clinical trials, including funding and regulatory obstacles as well as lengthy contract negotiations4. These challenges also exist across early-stage research, manufacturing scale-up, distribution and access to new interventions.
The UK's COVID-19 pandemic response demonstrated how effective coordination across Government bodies and Regulatory authorities can accelerate the development and distribution of health solutions to large populations. Significant obstacles were addressed through rolling reviews of data during clinical trials to expedite approvals, emergency authorisations and centralised contracting, with mutual benefits and collaborative problem solving between Public Bodies and Biopharma manufacturers facilitated by the Vaccine Taskforce5,6.
The COVID-19 pandemic response serves as an important example of how Biopharma collaboration with healthcare providers can overcome traditional infrastructural barriers and enable Biopharma organisations to deliver health interventions at scale.
Key get-rights across the strategic partnership lifecycle:
- Establish clear contracting principles to set the partnership on the path for success
- Proactively outline the common and individualised benefits for each organisation to prosper within the partnership
| How Baringa supported the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine programme: NHS England required Baringa’s support to mobilise the vaccines programme for the successful deployment, manufacture and distribution, and delivery of the UK vaccination programme. Baringa facilitated the interactions between Government and Biopharma organisations to accelerate the E2E supply chain integration, supporting the design of the vaccine's rollout, ensuring it was fit for purpose, aligned and integrated ahead of mobilisation. We also sourced and awarded key contracts, provided commercial assurance and ensured delivery of key workstreams to the critical path including developing strategy across pillars of the programme |
Aligning on a common vision, clear goals and shared motivations between Biopharma and Academia to embrace scientific innovation
Academia is a major healthcare ecosystem player and is becoming increasingly important in the discovery of novel drug therapies7. Despite the promise in scientific innovation, Academia typically experiences funding challenges in bringing innovation to the market8. Biopharma organisations can alleviate the challenges Academia face by bridging the translation of scientific innovation into accelerated development and commercialisation of potential therapies9.
Coupled with increasing track records of successful academic-industry collaborations10, new strategic partnerships are also extending in ambition and length, exampled by the announcement of a strategic 5-year partnership between GSK and Cambridge University in October 202411.
A common challenge of effective Biopharma-Academia partnering is the misalignment of a common vision and lack of agreement on the shared risk and reward of the partnership10,12. This can lead to scepticism of motives and lack of trust between partners, hindering the ability to collaborate effectively.
To maximise the partnering potential with Academia, Biopharma can play a leading role in setting up for success through creating a common vision and synergising cultures while retaining clarity on the share of risk and reward.
Key get-rights across the strategic partnership lifecycle:
- Invest time to understand the culture and motivations of academic partners to maximise areas of synergy in ways of working and build mutual trust
- Craft a clear approach to the handling of intellectual property (including ownership and rights) to minimise feelings of concern about risks associated with exchanging data and knowledge
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How Baringa supported a rare disease Biopharma to optimise their Academic collaborations: A global rare disease Biopharma had several pathways for developing assets across the R&D pipeline, such as sponsored studies and independently led investigator-initiated studies. However, the activities, processes, and responsibilities for delivering successful academic collaborations were less clear. We worked with the client to define principles guiding each stage of the Clinical Research Collaboration lifecycle, from strategy development to continuous improvement. These principles included input from cross-functional leaders in both European and American markets to ensure relevance across the R&D pipeline, enabling consistent and optimised outcomes in future academic partnerships. Key was recognising how the Biopharma needed to adapt its ways of working and expectations in an academic setting compared to more familiar collaborations with other Biopharma. |
Investing in partnering skills and capabilities to drive effective ways of working across multiple partners
In addition to increased prevalence and length of partnerships, the healthcare ecosystem is also seeing more complex partnerships, leveraging multiple players across the drug discovery and development lifecycle to bring new options to market. A recent example of this is the interconnectivity of multiple Biopharma organisations and Charity / Not-For-Profit organisations to discover and develop a first-in-class drug to treat breast cancer13.
As the partnership landscape grows in complexity, Biopharma technical teams are increasingly working across multiple collaborations across the drug discovery and development process, each governed by different arrangements and often with different goals. To succeed in this environment, teams need to adapt their structures, skills and behaviours accordingly which requires partnering to become a core capability rather than a ‘nice-to-have’.
In traditional individual development pathways, partnership capabilities have often remained a secondary priority to technical capabilities. However, with the clear shift towards partnering as a core delivery model for Biopharma organisations, it’s critical to equip technical teams with the right partnering capabilities in order to deliver the outcomes required of the partnership.
The key get-rights across the strategic partnership lifecycle:
- Develop partnering skills & capabilities across technical teams to be able to deliver in partnership with wider organisations
- Revamp individual performance management and incentivisation frameworks to promote the importance of cross-functional collaboration, and embedding of the partnering skills & capabilities built across the organisation
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How Baringa have supported technical teams to embed collaborative behaviours: Baringa helped a global Biopharma’s Clinical Lab organisation to overcome siloes to be able to partner & collaborate effectively with their clinical study teams. We worked closely with lab and study teams to understand their processes and roles and responsibilities, as well as identify the key driving behaviours that underpinned their ways of working. We conducted a series of immersive workshops (Habit Labs) to simulate the working environment, exploring opportunities to improve ways of working and identifying the different behaviours that drove positive and negative ways of working in real life. We worked across the teams to outline individual commitments to driving positive and habitual behaviours going forward.
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We work across the Biopharma and Healthcare sectors to advise organisations on how to maximise strategic partnerships to drive health outcomes for populations.
We can work with you to assess your partnership strategy and operating model, and co-develop tailored solutions to suit the needs of your current and future partnerships
Get in touch with Josh Elliott to find out more about how we can help your organisation.
References
- Partnering with purpose | NHS Confederation
- The Trouble with Pharma Partnerships ... And How to Fix Them
- Vital lessons from struggling partnerships and potential partnerships: an international study with leaders across the health sector - PMC
- Operational complexities in international clinical trials: a systematic review of challenges and proposed solutions | BMJ Open
- How contracting and procurement disciplines helped the UK avoid vaccine supply problems
- Chapter 9: pharmaceutical interventions: therapeutics and vaccines - GOV.UK
- Expanding roles for academic entrepreneurship in drug discovery - ScienceDirect
- Academic drug discovery: Challenges and opportunities - ScienceDirect
- Forming Meaningful PharmaAcademia Partnerships
- The Collaboration Between Industry and Academia in Drug Development
- GSK and Cambridge University announce new five-year collaboration in kidney and respiratory disease | GSK
- Academic-industry collaboration: Intertwined for drug discovery
- ICR welcomes NICE recommendation of capivasertib for advanced breast cancer
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