The 2025 Davos World Economic Forum brought together business leaders from multiple industries to debate the challenges and issues facing the world today. The Pharma CEOs in attendance discussed critical topics such as the impact of climate change on health, AI-driven innovation, and the complexities of global trade tensions, all of which look set to shape the industry in the coming year.
Climate Change and Health
“If we continue on the current trajectory, we will end up with 14.5 million deaths by 2050 because of climate change,” warned Shyam Biswayn, head of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare, opening the “When Climate Redefines Health” session on Wednesday.
The consequences of climate change are far-reaching and have some perhaps unsuspected effects on health, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel reminded the audience and panellists. Beyond the spread of tropical diseases, which Bancel said have become “more prevalent, and not just in the global south,” he also spoke of the health impact of extreme heat and air pollution. Focusing on sleep disorders caused by extreme heat, Bancel talked about their impact on brain health, connection to Alzheimer’s disease and their effect on the immune system.
The session’s panellists agreed that a more collaborative multi-stakeholder approach is needed with Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) arguing for cooperation between meteorological and health agencies.
“The pharma industry needs to work on education,” said Bancel, stressing that behaviours that are bad for people’s health are also bad for the environment. ““There are a lot of things we need to do collectively to educate the public and doctors, that we can change habits and behaviours.”
Going from Treatment to Prevention
“Healthy populations are the foundation for prosperous communities and strong economies, so it starts by considering health as a strategic asset and all the money we spend on it is an investment,” said Michel Demaré, chair of the board at AstraZeneca at Wednesday’s Health beyond Healthcare discussion.
Demaré argued that with ageing populations, three billion people living with chronic disease in the world, and the impact of climate change that vulnerable people have become even more vulnerable. But healthcare systems are still focused on treating instead of keeping people healthy. “In the OECD, three percent of health budgets go to prevention. More than half [of that three percent is spent] on hospitalization and late treatment,” Demaré lamented.
“I’m not here to say that health systems should spend more, but that they should spend smarter, and that is where we have to all get together to think long term about what we can do to transform the way health systems are functioning, starting by putting much more focus on prevention,” the AZ chair continued.
To do this Demaré spoke of the power of public-private partnerships, citing the Big Pharma’s current partnerships for health systems sustainability and resilience. “We are sponsoring countries’ full assessment studies of their health systems and then issuing evidence-based recommendations, convening all the actors of the ecosystem and try to come to effective solutions. A lot is about prevention and early detection but also about better use of digital and data and other recommendations in terms of administration.”
Also participating in the panel was Takeda president and CEO Christophe Weber, who did speak for augmenting healthcare budgets, but also for gaining efficiency through predictive healthcare, claiming that this approach could save as much as 30 percent of healthcare costs.
“Healthcare was always designed to treat people once they are sick,” he asserted. “We know that we are under-investing in prevention, but what we can do now is not just prevention, but predictive healthcare. There is enough data now, enough knowledge to actually know before the disease has progressed too much, what kind of issues people will face and if we start to move into this notion, we will gain enormous efficiency.”
While the panel did present a grim picture of the global access inequalities that remain, Weber was optimistic about the future of healthcare. “[Predictive medicine] enables us to tackle disease sooner and that’s a good reason to be optimistic because the efficiency we will see will be extraordinary, so that combined with political willingness to have equitable healthcare systems and sufficient funding allow me to be optimistic about the future.”
AI: Transparency and Changing Roles
Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson, speaking at the Industries in the Intelligent Age panel on Tuesday, made it clear that the French pharma has fully embraced Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the organization, particularly in drug discovery. “Roughly a third of the discovery effort for the drugs that will launch in 10 years are being validated by AI … we’re using AI to genetically validate targets, to make sure we’re likely to bring forward a medicine a decade later,” he said.
AI adoption has required a change in mindset and a shift in roles, said Hudson, speaking about the “radical transparency of data” the organization has developed. “In big corporations, there are a lot of managers and senior managers who’ve made careers out of slide decks to make sure that they can communicate upwards what we should think about a situation. With radical transparency, we’ve sort of blown that away. People can turn bad news into good news with the right PowerPoint presentation. We’re trying to really avoid that,” he said.
Hudson also spoke about meetings among the company’s top management to discuss drug development that begin with AI recommendations, another shift in mentality. “We do that because it’s very sobering, because the agent doesn’t have a career at stake,” Hudson said. “The agent isn’t wedded to the project for the last 10 years. The agent is dispassionately saying: ‘Don’t go forward or go forward faster, or go forward and remember these things.'” “And we’re not used to having somebody without a career at stake in the room at a senior level,” he continued.
The Sanofi chief claimed that adoption in the sector is slow, but that Sanofi is in the lead. “I think in the race with the turtles, we’re the lead turtle. “
Navigating Geopolitical Challenges
Despite escalating tensions between the United States, Europe and China, at Friday’s US-EU-China triangle session Belen Garijo, chair of the executive board and CEO at Merck stressed the connections between the three powers. “Europe, the US and China are highly interdependent and highly inter-connected,” she affirmed. “They are competitive rivals but they are also trading partners and they are in a way strategic allies, so I don’t think conflict is going to be good for anyone.” This is particularly relevant for Merck, which Garijo emphasised, has a huge presence in all three geographies. “Our heritage and our headquarters and our operations are proudly European but we have the largest workforce in the US and the largest source of revenue in China and Asia Pacific.”
Given ongoing uncertainty, including potential US tariffs, Merck is preparing for multiple scenarios. However, the Merck boss said that despite these challenges, she remains optimistic. “After everything I’ve experienced this week, one thing above all makes me optimistic about the future: Our continued desire to collaborate in ways that can make life better and brighter for the people and communities we serve. At Merck, we remain strong believers in free trade and the power of building multilateral collaborations with private and public partners.”
One area Garijo did stress was the need for Europe to break through the disconnection between the EU as a whole and its individual member states and step up its competitivity efforts in the face of current challenges and threats. “Making Europe more competitive is going to be a multi-year effort. We need to move with speed and a sense of urgency that is required to catch up on certain topics: innovation and growth, to create an environment in Europe that is favourable to industry and sustainable growth.”
