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| Science |
| Pfizer's digital chief: Technology can speed the race to a COVID-19 vaccine |
| 2020-04-16 |
| [Fast Company] On January 24, as the novel coronavirus started to spread in China, the government enacted travel restrictions throughout Hubei, the province where humans first contracted the disease. "I remember vividly on January 27 that our Chinese colleagues could not [get to] work, and we got the first request to help," recalled Lidia Fonseca, chief digital and technology officer at Pfizer. Employees who had worked on desktops or left laptops in the office couldn’t access work materials, so Fonseca’s team set up virtual desktops so people could access the pharmaceutical company’s network and applications. For Fonseca, the January 27 scramble was an early warning signal for what was to come: In region after region, as the virus spread throughout the world, a large number of Pfizer’s 90,000 employees moved to remote work, tapping into the company’s digital infrastructure as never before. Today, Pfizer is seeing about 83,000 remote connections a day; previously, remote connections would peak at about 25,000 on Fridays, when many employees telecommute. Pfizer, of course, isn’t just an average corporation making the transition to remote work as states and countries ask citizens to shelter in place. The 170-year-old drugmaker is, like many of its peers, on the front lines of racing to find a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19. And Fonseca, who joined the company in January 2019, is quietly working behind the scenes to ensure that Pfizer’s researchers and scientists have the tools they need to work with each other, and increasingly, partners and rivals at other firms. Fonseca and her team play an essential role in "delivering breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, and to do this as quickly as possible," says Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive officer. Collaboration among scientists at different companies and institutions—long a part of the drug-development process—has taken on added urgency because of the coronavirus health crisis. Pfizer, for example, is partnering with German biotech company BioNTech to accelerate development of a COVID-19 vaccine. Other major drug companies, such as Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, have announced alliances with smaller biotech companies to jointly research, develop, or test vaccines. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 This headline is infuriating, but it looks like Pfizer actually gave a good interview to a typically moronic journalist. I clicked on this expecting a Bee article... |
| Posted by: Vernal Hatrick 2020-04-16 08:51 |
| #1 No shit. And here I was concentration on the power of prayer. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-04-16 07:24 |