EyeForPharma, Philadelphia – Paul Simms, Chairman of eyeforpharma kicked off his annual conference with a call to arms: We have an innovation gap. We invest in R&D at twice the rate of competing industries. But we haven’t made the progress we want to.

No single innovator is going to create that change. We need alignment on a mass scale and to do more than we’ve done before.

Simms challenged the attendees to listen over the next two days for opportunities to deliver on the conference theme of: being trusted partners.

We need to form collaborations, he said. Our value as pharmaceutical companies is more than just our medicines. We can act and advocate from the patient perspective.

Simms is personally involved in The Aurora Project. It was created about a year and half ago when a group of people got talking about patient centricity. They realized that there was no benchmark for the industry on what that actually means. So, that team decided to create one.

In their first survey, they received 2,000 responses and used those to define specific deficits – dark corners where focusing on the patient is still something people are reluctant to do.

The Aurora Project today is 110 volunteers working to shine a light in those dark corners and help the industry become more patient centric.