IMCAS 2020: interview with Luca Crippa

What impact does a global pandemic like the COVID-19 emergency have on the work of a multinational pharmaceutical company? Luca Crippa, CEO & Managing Director of IBSA Farmaceutici, answered this and other questions during the international webinar run by IMCAS ACADEMY in October; a global reference point for dermatology, plastic surgery and aesthetic medicine.

“For the entire duration of the first lockdown,” Crippa explained, “we felt it was our duty to guarantee therapeutic continuity to patients. We worked at all levels to the best of our ability, rapidly accelerating innovation in internal company processes. At IBSA, we have the advantage of controlling the entire company value chain, from production to distribution, which allowed us to act at all levels to overcome critical issues. In short, throughout this pandemic, IBSA has demonstrated a very high level of resilience and we’re all very proud of the result.”

Safety, both internal and external to the company, has been another central point of all our strategies since March: “We’ve put every possible initiative in place at all the company's sites, applying all the regulations in force and adding, where possible, even stricter protocols.”

The other innovation introduced during lockdown has been to use modern remote learning tools to maintain proximity to scientific partners, which are fundamental both for the development of new products, which has never stopped, and for daily activities, both in the production and R&D sectors.

After the initial period of settlement, IBSA has nevertheless achieved ambitious goals and objectives. Thanks to strong geographical and market expansion in recent years, its product portfolio, which includes many products covered by international patents, and the market shares gained or consolidated even during the pandemic, the company can look forward to the next few years.

During the symposium, finally, there was ample space to talk about the consequences of stopping in-person conferences and medical events on account of the pandemic. For Crippa, they will not disappear because of the strong trend towards digitisation that the pandemic has forced the world to adopt. “Online events will remain a very useful add-on to reach wider audiences and to have greater frequency of interaction, but face-to-face meetings and human interaction cannot be replaced.”