Northwest’s global pharma hub demonstrates untapped potential of rural Ireland

In the shadow of Ben Bulben, AbbVie is making medicines for the world. Ground-breaking healthcare innovation is taking place amid surroundings that once moved W.B. Yeats to Nobel Prize-winning poetry.

The impact of Sligo’s biopharmaceutical sector inspires local pride – but it is global in scale. The biopharmaceutical company AbbVie is currently telling this story through a new film that is part of a campaign called Innovate for Life. Led by the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA), the outreach is designed to drive awareness of the positive social and economic impact of Ireland’s medicines manufacturing industry.

The AbbVie contribution focuses on Sligo. The Chicago headquartered company has plants and offices all over Ireland, from Dublin to Cork to Mayo. However, it has been significantly invested in Sligo since the 1970s, where it has two separate plants with the first built in 1974. Darren Egan, a Cavan native, moved to Sligo in in 2002 as part of the start-up team creating AbbVie’s second facility on the Manorhamilton Road. He arrived in the northwest as a technical support chemist but, following time away in several other roles across AbbVie’s network, returned to the Sligo facility three years ago as site general manager.

Egan, who is originally from Cavan Town, is full of praise for the talent and capability of the workforce in the west and northwest and he links their can-do attitude to the tremendous quality of life that is available to the employees of multinational companies who are fortunate to work in this part of Ireland.

New approaches

“The pandemic has inspired many people to think about the possibility of new lives, outside the hustle, bustle, traffic jams and housing shortages of our major cities. I drive 15 minutes to work and there isn’t a single traffic light on the way. The ESRI predicts that Ireland’s population is going to rise to six million by 2050 and it’s time for long-term thinking on how best to accommodate more than a million extra citizens. More people in the same places will create more of the same problems.

“This film shows the Atlantic coast at its very best – as one of the greatest places in Europe to live and work. It also confirms that cutting-edge international medicines innovation, for which Ireland is globally renowned, can take place all around Ireland in places like Sligo,” he explained.

[For more information about the Innovate for Life campaign, visit abbvie.ie/InnovateForLife]

Sligo has been designated as a regional development hub in the Ireland 2040 national planning framework and AbbVie's experience in the town certainly helps highlight local capability and its longer-term potential. Egan believes harnessing the attractiveness of this region to a new generation of employee in a post-pandemic society can facilitate the expansion of Ireland's biopharma footprint.

It is an approach AbbVie, which was ranked as Ireland’s No.1 Great Place to Work by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2020, has actively embraced. It has created and built on partnerships with local science educators in IT Sligo. AbbVie believes this activation of local workforce capability is key to its continued success in the region. In the longer term, a growing local talent pool may catch the eye of Irish pharma’s many other companies and help facilitate the development of a new medicines manufacturing cluster to create opportunities for those living in Sligo, Mayo, Donegal.

“Our company’s Irish story is a timely reminder that powerful opportunities remain despite the challenges of the pandemic and Brexit. Unlocking the potential of this wider region, often considered to be disadvantaged economically, will require renewed effort. But, as AbbVie’s experience shows, the development of a strong western economic corridor stretching from Donegal to Kerry can make a significant impact in places like Co Sligo and Co Mayo,” Egan added.

Economic lynchpin

As many industries faced challenges during this health crisis, the biopharmaceutical sector has continued to generate jobs, to export, to invest. The Central Bank reported last year that our industry's exports topped €446.2 billion, a €50 billion increase on the previous total. Figures showed that during the first nine months of 2019, pharmaceuticals accounted for 62 per cent of the goods sold abroad by the Republic. The Central Bank noted that biopharmaceuticals dominated growth in exports during the previous 18 months¹.

This globally significant Irish economic strength is something that AbbVie’s Dublin-based commercial general manager, Andrés Rodrigo-Días, was largely unaware of before he arrived in Ireland more than a year ago. The Spaniard took up the post after stints with AbbVie’s commercial organisation in a variety of roles in Spain, Italy, and the company’s European headquarters in Paris.

“I knew Ireland produced medicines but, when I arrived, I was surprised at the scale. I think few observers outside Ireland, including many economic commentators, really appreciate the extent of the economic contribution the biopharmaceutical sector makes to Ireland’s economy. Domestically, it also has a lower profile than it perhaps deserves. This may be because it is less accessible and less emotionally attractive than other elements of our foreign direct investment achievements. Internet technology and iPhones are always easier to talk and write about than biochemistry and cell engineering.

“Yet, the pandemic may change that. What Covid-19 has done is shine the brightest of lights on the acute importance of the products our industry produces. Long-term investment by the global biopharmaceutical sector is what has enabled the rapid discovery of safe and effective vaccines. In this crisis, the public has realised that science represents the only way back to normality, or whatever version of it we find,” the Madrid native stated.

Paradox

Rodrigo is hopeful that a long-term outcome of the current pandemic challenge will be to highlight for policy makers that new medicines are a vital part of society’s technological progression.  He believes the significance of the health benefits new medicines contribute can often be overlooked and adds, a little incredulously, this has been particularly the case in Ireland – a country that is an economic powerhouse in making those very products.

The AbbVie employee points out that, since 2007, average life expectancy in Ireland has increased by almost 2.5 years. Women will live to 84 on average and male counterparts will see just past 80². The general manager said innovations in treatments have been a key part of this very welcome trend and predicts Irish-supported future innovations and medical breakthroughs are likely to add to it.

"In some areas, patients have been offered much-needed cures. A good example of an area of burgeoning research is Hepatitis C, a virus in the blood with few visible symptoms, which was first identified in 1989. It is estimated that 15 million people across Europe have a chronic Hepatitis C infection³. Until very recently, a significant number of these faced developing cirrhosis or liver cancer⁴.

However, following decades of research, biopharmaceutical companies finally managed to crack the challenge of producing effective Hepatitis C treatments. New generation drugs directly attack the virus and prevent it from replicating. Approximately 95 per cent of those with Hepatitis C can now be cured and the WHO has now challenged governments around the world to use these medicines to fully eradicate the disease by 2030. Manufacturing for this element of AbbVie’s medicines portfolio is strongly supported in Ireland across several of the company’s plants.

“Elsewhere, in diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and psoriasis, AbbVie’s product portfolio is wide-ranging and pioneering. Much of the manufacturing innovation that makes all that possible, takes place in Ireland,” Rodrigo added.

Progress

In 2021, the Government’s spending on health will rise to €21 billion, €4 billion of which covers mainly Covid-19-related expenses. Amid the ledger list of spending in the last budget was an allocation of €50 million bookmarked for investment in new medicines this year. Rodrigo states that this was a measure Ireland’s pharmaceutical industry really welcomed.

He explained: “The allocation of these funds stemmed from an acknowledgement by Government that an ‘Innovation Paradox’ had been allowed to develop in Ireland through a lack of funding for new medicines. A situation had been allowed to develop where Ireland was manufacturing many of Europe’s ground-breaking medicines yet lags far behind other countries in the speed at which it makes them available to its patients.

“In surveys of European countries measuring speed of access to new medicines, we rank very poorly. The latest poll, taken just before summer, highlights that Ireland came in 19th place out of 34 European countries for speed of access to some new treatments. At an average of 500 days from medicine authorisation to availability, Ireland can take up to 10 times longer compared to Germany. Closer to home, across the border, we find many new medicines available to patients that cannot be accessed here. That gap could widen further with Brexit if the UK makes good on its promise to shorten the time it takes to approve medicines. Allowing this paradox to continue does not serve us well.”

Rodrigo points out that extra budget allocation of €50 million for new medicines last year was the first increase in a decade. He believes it can deliver a positive impact for patients awaiting the HSE’s green-lighting of new, life-changing treatments – but only if the investment is sustained. The pharma general manager expects industry to introduce more than 50 new treatments this year alone, some of them AbbVie’s. He believes Irish citizens should not have to wait to get them. As a new State/industry supply agreement looms, Rodrigo urged the government to ensure budgeting for new medicines is placed on a sustainable long-term path. And he suggested both sides in the negotiations – industry and government – could contribute to the bill. Cooperation in this area should not be problematic, the AbbVie leader said, given partnership characterises the government’s relationship with industry at every other stage in the medicines continuum.

Innovation consistency

“Medicines innovation is a circular process. It begins with discovery (R&D) and progresses to testing (clinical trials) before any significant manufacturing takes place. Ireland should be proud of its global manufacturing base – but the final stage in the medicine continuum is adoption. That is where patients get the benefits of innovation. It is where innovators realise investments made earlier in the process.

“The Government strongly supports R&D through Science Foundation Ireland. It supports testing the efficacy and safety of new medicines through Clinical Trials Ireland. IDA Ireland has done outstanding work in attracting medicines manufacturing to Ireland. But failing to support one of these key phases – as Ireland has done by showing a weak commitment to adopting new treatments – significantly undermines assertions that Ireland is an ‘innovation island’ committed to supporting the biopharmaceutical industry.

“Innovation can have a transformational impact on patients’ lives. It has a social, as well as an economic dividend. Let us resolve to create the world-class healthcare system envisaged by Sláintecare – and invest in innovation as an enabler for better patient outcomes.”

For further information about the Innovate for Life campaign, visit abbvie.ie/InnovateForLife

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