Our cover feature this month (p19) highlights pharma’s laudable ability to continually innovate in the logistics landscape to secure a continuous supply of medicine, having to meet ever-changing demands and challenges such as fluctuating market dynamics, new regulation, climate change, the emergence of highly specialist therapies and, new for 2020, pandemics. As John Pinching notes, it’s an area of pharma often unheralded and yet constantly ‘looking forward, setting the pace and reaching further’.

Also on the theme of COVID-19, on page 40 Accenture’s Brad Michel describes how pharma companies have improved how they engage with healthcare providers during the pandemic. He says there’s ‘a unique opportunity’ for pharma to increase its relevance to healthcare professionals and patients, ‘with lasting impact post-pandemic’. On page 32, Chris Sigley outlines findings of a survey of life sciences professionals, commissioned by Arkivum in collaboration with Phlexglobal and the Ethical Medicines Industry Group (EMIG), into the conduct of clinical trials and management of trial data; 70% of the 200+ respondents said COVID-19 has triggered a change in the way clinical trials will be conducted, again highlighting the wide-ranging impact of the pandemic.

Elsewhere, OVID Health’s Rachel Gonzaga highlights the key lessons from the Patient Partnership Conference (p36), while on page 24 we celebrate the winners of the 2020 PharmaTimes Clinical Researcher of the Year – The America’s competition. Congratulations to all finalists and winners!