A 2015 report from The Lancet Global Surgery Commission found that nearly one-third of the global burden of disease can be treated surgically and that 5 billion people lack access to safe and affordable surgical care.
At Johnson & Johnson, we are looking to improve the standard of care and treatment, accelerating our pace of innovation, training more physicians globally through our surgical institutes and our partnerships – such as with the AO Foundation – to help make a difference for patients. As a global leader in the field of surgery our products are literally stitched into almost every surgical procedure in every market around the world.
As the Head of Research and Development for the Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies, I have the privilege of leading a team of more than 3,500 engineers, scientists and clinicians focused on developing and delivering safe and clinically meaningful innovative solutions that address unmet needs. It is through the lens of meaningful innovation and the benefits it brings for patients that we make important decisions about how we advance our portfolio.
Recently, we’ve brought all of our Medical Devices R&D into a single organisation so that we can adapt our Medical Device innovation model to better meet the needs of a rapidly changing healthcare environment. We have launched an Innovation Agenda that is clear and actionable to everyone in our organisation. Our Agenda places a premium on innovation that we can deliver. It ensures our teams have the proper funding to support innovation and that we create a culture that rewards prudent risk taking. Most importantly, our Innovation Agenda challenges everyone in our organisation to participate in driving meaningful innovation.
Specifically, we are shifting our focus from platforms to solutions so that we address medical needs across the full continuum of disease. We are broadening our lens on innovation by focusing on five priority disease states – areas of significant unmet need and disease burden where we know we can bring the greatest value to patients. We are also becoming more agnostic to whether innovation comes from our talented internal R&D teams or from the outside. And lastly, we are leveraging our global scale and capabilities to drive flawless execution of our pipeline.
What’s most exciting is that I am challenging our R&D teams to embrace a vision where we can deliver solutions that diagnose, stage and treat early lung cancer through one intervention; treat diabetes in obese patients with an endoscopic approach that does not require a major surgery; regenerate degenerated articular cartilage; use smart implants that assess healing of a bone fracture; and, use minimally invasive procedures for heart failure and for complex heart valve diseases.
This is just a sample of what we believe we can deliver through meaningful innovation that advances human health, reaches more patients and restores more lives.
