The CEO Investor Forum Launches Partnership with the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable to Address the Need for Stronger Industry-wide Sustainability Efforts in Biotech and Pharmaceuticals Sector

NEW YORK, July 9,2020 /3BL Media/ — Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are actively working to enhance their sustainability efforts to increase the emphasis on long-term value creation, stakeholder engagement, and forward-looking disclosures. To support these efforts, the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable (BSRT) has formed a partnership with CECP’s CEO Investor Forum. Together, the two groups will co-host the first sector-specific CEO-Investor Forum in June 2021.

The BSRT works across the sector to drive collaboration between senior biotech and pharma executives to move their sustainability agendas forward. Following two years of dialogue between biopharma companies and institutional investors, BSRT recently published the Biopharma Investor Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Communications Guidance. Its goal: create a more effective and efficient way to communicate the sector’s most important ESG topics. Over the course of the next year, BSRT and the CEO Investor Forum will work closely with biopharma CEOs to create and share Sustainable Long-Term Plans with their institutional investors, moving the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to focus on driving value for all stakeholders, a group that includes shareholders, employees, suppliers, and the communities the companies serve.

“We are delighted to work together with the CEO Investor Forum to help biotech and pharma companies better incorporate ESG strategies into their long-term plan,” said Sandor Schoichet, Co-Founder of the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable. “The Guidance is designed to be useful to investors who want to understand the biopharma sector ESG landscape, and to inform companies about how ESG information affects their investing decisions.”

The Biopharma Investor ESG Communications Guidance identifies the most important ESG topics for the industry, including access to healthcare and medicine pricing; business ethics, integrity, and compliance; climate change; clinical trial practices; ESG governance; environmental impacts; human capital management; innovation in therapeutics, diagnostics, and business models; pharmaceuticals in the environment and anti-microbial resistance; product quality and patient safety; risk and crisis management; and supply chain management. 

Biopharma companies involved in the development of the Guidance included Astellas, Amgen, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Lonza, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Roche.

“Drawing on our track record of success in healthcare, biotech, and pharma, working with Henry Schein, Humana, GSK, AmerisourceBergen, and Merck, this partnership is a natural evolution for our work in the sector,” said Nandika Madgavakar, Senior Director & Head of the CEO Investor Forum. “This is an important step in our overarching mission to move the capital markets toward a focus on the long term, to better prepare companies for the next generation.”

As the next generation of people continues to play a larger role in the economy, they are a driving force toward stakeholder capitalism. Their expectations for companies will be different from their predecessors. The CEO Investor Forum’s Sustainable Long-Term Plan framework provides guidance for companies moving in that direction. Created in partnership with Professor George Serafeim of Harvard Business School, his team at KKS Advisors, and a group of leading institutional investors, the framework is market-tested and proven to help address these growing market needs. Sustainable long-term planning enables companies to change the conversation they have with investors, and enable a change of focus from short-term, quarter-to-quarter earnings, to sustainable long-term value creation, corporate citizenship, and social impact. 

As part of this partnership between BSRT and CECP, companies will receive access to and guidance on leveraging the CEO Investor Forum’s proprietary Sustainable Long-Term Plan Framework, which challenges CEOs to articulate their long-term strategy across nine themes and twenty-two forward-looking, decision-relevant disclosures.

“In order to serve this sector, we will cross-reference the BSRT’s recently published Biopharma Investor ESG Communications Guidance to apply a biopharma lens to the CEO Investor Forum’s Long-Term Plan framework to identify critical business factors and their associated metrics that are decision-relevant to the biopharma industry,” said Brian Tomlinson, Director of Research at the CEO Investor Forum. “This partnership will support leading biotech and pharma companies as they develop and share forward-looking metrics, including financially material ESG metrics, with their key stakeholders.”

To learn more about these industry association partnerships, contact the CEO Investor Forum at cif@cecp.co.

To learn more about the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable, contact Sandor Schoichet at sschoichet@meridianmc.com.

About the CEO Investor Forum

The CEO Investor Forum is a global organization preparing corporate leaders for the next generation of stakeholders. The Forum provides support and guidance to CEOs on how to develop and communicate their long-term strategy to institutional investors and other key constituencies. Through a proprietary content framework, advisory services, and events, the Forum empowers CEOs to proactively set the context, own their narrative, and lead toward a sustainable future. CEO Investor Forum is chaired by Bill McNabb, former Chairman of Vanguard. Learn more at www.ceoinvestorforum.com.

About the Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable

The Biopharma Sustainability Roundtable is a sector-specific collaboration platform that helps senior biotech and pharma executives drive their Sustainability agendas forward. We facilitate an annual cycle of webinars and topical forums, a sector-focused survey, and Sustainability Month in the Fall, a series of online discussions addressing broad agenda of ESG topics defined in collaboration with our participants. Executives and invited thought leaders come together to explore Sustainability challenges and trends, examine cutting-edge industry topics, share best practices, and learn from each other. The Roundtable also facilitates focused initiatives that engage participating biopharma companies and key stakeholders, such as the Biopharma Investor ESG Communications Initiative now working with CECP.