Bristol Myers’ commercial chief on the industry’s ‘seismic’ changes over 27 years and what’s coming next

Over a quarter of a century, Bristol Myers Squibb has gone through many transformations from becoming a more diversified company to one focused entirely on biopharma. And during his more than two decades at Bristol Myers, Adam Lenkowsky has grown with the company as it navigated multiple major acquisitions and strategy shifts.

In October, the pharma giant picked up immuno-oncology specialist Mirati Therapeutics for $5.8 billion, a move that brought in an approved lung cancer drug and a pipeline of potential future launches. Add that to 2019’s megamerger with Celgene, and Lenkowsky, now the company’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, said the quickly growing portfolio at one of the world’s largest pharma companies comes at a unique time in the industry.

“Almost 27 years in, I have the same amount of excitement that I had when I first started right out of school,” Lenkowsky said. “This is the most exciting time in our industry and in our company’s history.”

Here, we spoke with the 2023 PharmaVoice 100 honoree about his career at Bristol Myers, and what’s in store for the company and biopharma in the years to come.

This interview has been edited for brevity and style.

PHARMAVOICE: You’ve been at Bristol Myers for more than 26 years. What does it mean to you to have spent your whole career at one company?

ADAM LENKOWSKI: It’s been incredible to start off in a sales representative role and work my way up to chief commercialization officer. It’s not something I would have ever dreamed about back in 1997. And to work for a company that is so focused on patients and its employees has been an incredible opportunity. I’ve had a front row seat to see how the company has evolved, and over two decades, the company has evolved probably four or five times. We were a company that was diversified well beyond pharmaceuticals with baby formula, medical devices, generics and an over-the-counter business. And then in 2007 we divested all of our non-pharma businesses, which was seen as being very risky, but now we’re seeing most companies follow suit, doing a lot of the same things we did 16 years ago.

From your perspective, how has the pharma industry changed over that time?

We’ve seen three seismic trends in the industry over the last several years. No. 1 is the speed of innovation, and for our company and our leadership in immuno-oncology and commercializing the first two cell therapies in the market, we’re talking about being able to cure patients with the deadliest cancers and doing that with incredible speed.

The second significant change is around a very dynamic access and policy environment, which is more challenging than ever. This shift requires being able to work much earlier on in the development cycle, being able to evaluate the economic and clinical value of a product at a much earlier stage.

Finally, COVID-19 fundamentally changed the way all of us live and work, but as it relates to the biopharma industry, it posed to all of us a good question that we hadn’t contemplated: What would happen if we couldn’t access physicians in person? We essentially changed the way we commercialized our products and started doing things we’d never had to do before. Now we are in the midst of a true digital revolution in pharma commercialization.

How has the pharma customer changed since you started at BMS?

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the customer was essentially the physician. That’s the way we all thought about it, and it was such a narrow view that has since expanded beyond the physician. The patient plays a more critical role than ever in his or her own decision making. And it also extends beyond into policymakers and advocates, so it’s a much more complicated network of influencers in the pharmaceutical environment.

When you’re handed a whole portfolio from an acquisition like Mirati’s, is that an exciting challenge for you?

From a commercial person like myself, that’s the most exciting thing we can have. It’s really around launching new products, and at Bristol Myers, we’ve launched nine new products in just four years. It requires a commercial leader to evolve the way we look at our evolving models to become more flexible and move as quickly as possible to get to more patients. And we’re going from a company with nine new products to one that has 15 or 20 products by the end of the decade.

With all these launches, what role does the drug pricing conversation play in your work?