COVID is driving lucrative bio-pharma integration---market strength is key.

Big tech’s growing interest in the healthcare sector has largely been seen to put it on a collision course with big pharma. However, there are early signs of a culture of collaboration emerging between big tech and big pharma, which has only been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Allie Nawrat asks what this new era of collaboration between big tech and big pharma could mean for healthcare.

Collaboration has widely been deemed a silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic. The word ‘unprecedented’ has certainly been overused in the past year, but nowhere is it more apt than in describing the actions of pharma companies big and small working together to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

One example is pharma giant Pfizer, which rapidly signed an agreement with mRNA technology vaccine pioneer BioNTech. A year later, Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine is approved for use across the world. The pair have now teamed up with other big pharma companies ,  and  to support the manufacturing of their Covid-19 vaccine.

This growing culture of collaboration in healthcare is starting to lead to partnerships not only within life sciences but also with other sectors, such as technology.

Big tech companies’ growing interest in the lucrative healthcare market has largely led to them entering the pharma landscape. For instance, Amazon’s first foray into healthcare was its 2018 acquisition of PillPack. The e-commerce giant has now signalled its continued interest in the sector by launching  at the end of 2020. Whereas Google has formed its own healthcare company, Verily, to focus on life science research across a range of indications, including Covid-19.

However, both big pharma and big tech are increasingly realizing these two sectors have more to gain from working together, than by competing. This has led to a flurry of deals being signed in the past few years between big pharma and big tech. One recent example is Boehringer Ingelheim teaming up with Google to apply the tech giant’s quantum computing expertise to pharma research and development (R&D).