The People Behind the Products: Alex Shimmings

I am responsible for what my UK-based team does from day to day and what we contribute to the entire Scrip publication. Scrip is one of Citeline’s Insights products, and it covers the pharmaceutical and biotech industries from the commercial perspective. We write about the pharmaceutical industry, the deals that companies negotiate, the money they make, the products they get to market, and the clinical trials that are undertaken. We also touch on regulatory. We try not to overlap with the Pink Sheet because they cover the pharmaceutical industry from the regulatory perspective,  whereas we ask, “What does this news event mean for the commercial prospects of this company?”

I have a counterpart in the US who runs the US team, and that's Mary Jo Laffler. And then we have another editor in the APAC region, Ian Haydock, who is based in Tokyo, Japan, and supervises journalists based in South Korea, China and India. We try to span the whole world. So Scrip as a whole is international.

I come in in the morning, and as a team we scan press releases that have come in and see what else is occurring news-wise. We'll meet as a UK team and decide what needs to be covered, who’s going to cover it and how, as well as factoring in what other things we've got going on.

And then I edit the work as it comes through in the day and I liaise with Mary Jo in America to see what they're going to be covering. And also with Ian. And we’re on this sort of treadmill because we're trying to get stories throughout the day across all the time zones.

And then I also have to do a lot of work on the editorial development. We have a new website, we've got new systems that are coming through, such as Tansa and Monday.com, and we work on how we're best going to implement those.

I also have a big role in the Scrip Awards that we put on every year. I have editorial oversight of the awards and I look at the categories and the entries and anything that's written about the awards. It's basically quality control, making sure that the awards are of the highest standard. It helps getting sponsors and helps with the prestige of the awards as well.

Mine is a very varied job. It’s always changing. We try to distinguish our output from our competitors, especially by drawing on our internal databases such as Biomedtracker and Datamonitor Healthcare, solutions from our sister company Evaluate, to create stories that are really unique to us. And then we do a lot of interviews; we’re very strong on C-suite interviews.

For a couple of years after I graduated university, I traveled a bit. Then I decided that I needed to get a proper job.

Actually, I was offered two jobs at the same time back in 1995. One was at the Home Office, with the civil service in the UK, and for the other I was interviewed by Ian Lloyd [author of Citeline’s annual Pharma R&D Review] for a job as an editorial assistant on Pharmaprojects. I decided that I'd rather write about drugs than join the Home Office. I wanted to write about medicine. I like communicating.

It was a really good grounding in the pharmaceutical industry and drug development, all the clinical phases. Having that entry-level job was really useful.

And they had the Pharmaprojects magazine as well where I could get experience in writing. A big part of my job was to edit the Scrip publication, which was then a biweekly printed newsletter on yellow paper. I had to read through it and extract all the information and add it to the Pharmaprojects database.

I realized there were opportunities at Scrip. Then one day the internal company newsletter, this is pre-internet, had a job vacancy for a trainee science reporter on Scrip. So I applied for it and got it. I started out on what was then the science desk. They trained me as a junior reporter, so that's how I started. And then a couple of years later, a few people left and then I became the editor of the science desk.

I stayed with Scrip because I just kept getting promoted. It's like an accidental career! I went from science reporter to science editor to deputy editor and managing editor.

I enjoy the job; it’s really interesting. Drug development is just a really interesting area, and it's quite funny now that I've been in it so long that I can remember writing early clinical data for drugs that are now off patent. I can remember all the clinical data for Nexium and Viagra.

I've seen real change. It used to be nothing was going on in cancer at all and everything was cardiology. And now, cardiology has waned and cancer is obviously huge. And then there’s the birth of immunology. I remember writing about Humira when it was in clinical trials.

Well, I suppose you have to do the job in order to be able to edit other people doing the job. You can't really come in as an editor. Especially if you learn on the job like me, because I had a science degree, biochemistry and microbiology, not a journalism degree.

You've got to understand what it is that the journalists are up against. You can create a wonderful piece of work, but if it takes you a week, that's no good. You've got to do it in a day. You've got to turn it around and to have some awareness of the pressure that’s placed on the reporters and writers. It's a question of actually getting something good enough to publish without losing its timeliness. So there's a sweet spot of, “OK, we've got to go with this now.” I think once you've been in that role, writing against a deadline, you have a much better understanding as an editor of what you can get done in that time.

When we were first starting out, we’d have a 5 o’clock deadline and that was it. I remember friends phoning me at work. And I’d say, “I can't talk. I've got to go.” Whereas now you don't have that. And I think something's been lost with 24-hour publishing because you don't have that hard stop. Obviously, we still have deadlines, but not in the same way that we did before. There's nothing like a deadline for really concentrating your brain.

The thing I enjoy most is writing about the science. I find the science of the new drugs coming through and how they work really interesting. You know, the clinical data and also how they fit into the therapeutic category that they're being developed for. Are they going to disrupt that category? What impact are they going to have on the market?

I think that what can be done now, particularly with immunotherapies and molecular biology in areas like cancer, is really quite incredible. The complete transformation of cancer treatment that's happened in the last 10 years or so is really encouraging.

Obviously, the industry is not perfect. Look at the history of Purdue Pharma and other great scandals, but I think most people in the industry are in it for the right reasons.

The industry is out to make money first and foremost, and they do it by developing drugs. But nobody else develops drugs for human use. And if we didn't have the industry, we wouldn't have all these advances. So I'm quite pragmatic about that.

I do enjoy going to medical meetings and reporting because you're hearing the latest developments first. You're the first people to hear it in the press conference. And you can interview the scientists … who've really made an impact. So it's interesting, seeing that human angle to drug development and the basic humanity that goes into it. I enjoy talking to the industry leaders and finding out what's important to them.

I like to get a study and read it over, think about the implications, think about the context and then synthesize it into a 1,000- or 1,500-word article. I enjoy that.

I also like looking at new areas of research in depth. For example, I did a big rough guide on targeted protein degradation, looking at what it was, who's active in the area, what deals are being done, what drugs are being developed, what the prospects are, what analysts think about the prospects for these drugs. It’s taking a wide look at a whole area of something that's new, that our readers will need to know about.

So I enjoy doing in-depth stories like that as well.

It’s lovely to be nominated and shortlisted for Best Deputy Editor/B2B in the BMSE Talent Awards.

Author’s note: Alex is extremely humble when it comes to her own accomplishments, so we’ve included a few excerpts from Citeline’s entry for her in this category:

A key aspect of Scrip’s work is sharing insights from industry meetings. Alex edited and authored multiple in-depth exclusive articles from ESMO, Europe’s largest oncology conference. She supported and encouraged her team not only to report live from conferences, but also to lead the agenda, moderating sessions at industry meetings including Bio-Europe, BIO, and LSX.

Alex produced a body of in-depth coverage on R&D and new drug trends in industry, co-hosting a webinar on the topic. Her team is one of the most productive in the organization.

Scrip’s coverage has prompted feedback from readers: “I very much enjoyed your quarterly analysis of the biopharma financing situation. … We highly appreciate the fantastic work you and your colleagues are doing.”

Well, personally, I interviewed the chief medical officer for Boehringer Ingelheim.

I'm also working on the Scrip Awards. It's the 21st year, and I came in on the second year. We're changing it a little bit this year by adding the Editor’s Choice Awards. For these five blue-ribbon categories, our editorial and analyst teams will handpick the finalists. We hope this will make it a bit more Oscars-ish, more prestigious. We want the shortlist to reflect the very best of the industry. This will be a real cachet for companies.

A panel of judges determines winners for all the other categories; we’ve had some of our judges since the beginning. They've stuck with us for many, many years. It does amaze me. They really enjoy it. The lifetime achievement award winner is always invited to become a judge. It's generally by invitation. What we're looking for are people with seniority, reaching the end of their active career, so that there won’t be too many conflicts of interest. We wanted to include more international people, to reflect the industry in the Far East and APAC. I am very aware of the entries of how much effort that goes into it and also, I'm very aware of what we ask of the judges.

The absolute highlight of my career was when I went to the World AIDS meeting in Bangkok. I was just coming back to the press room and there were all these crowds and cameras, and I thought, “Oh, what's going on here?” I couldn't get through, but I could get into the press room because it had two doors and I had a press pass. I could get in and circumvent the crowd by going through the press room. So that's what I did and I came out the other side. And just as I came out, Nelson Mandela walked towards me. And smiled at me. He smiled at me. He was literally about 3 feet away from me. That was the absolute highlight.

And then we had a press conference with him. That was way back in 2004. There were huge breakthroughs going on all the time with HIV. So that was a really interesting area to cover at the time.

And in the early part of the century there was an awful lot going on in cardiology. So it was always really interesting to go to the cardiology meetings and have all those big studies for drugs like Lipitor and Crestor.

And I remember when Vioxx got withdrawn; that was a huge, huge deal. It's interesting, we haven't had a drug withdrawal on that kind of scale for a long time.

The explosion in immuno-oncology has been hugely fascinating and very interesting to study. When we first got into targeted anti-cancers that was a real highlight as well.

COVID obviously was huge. All I can remember about COVID is working because we had nothing else to do but write about all these vaccines.

Before COVID, I was writing about mRNA flu vaccines. I remember doing this article about flu and people were saying, “Oh yes, this is very exciting. It's all really early and it will be 10 years before we get them.” And then suddenly COVID happened and we had mRNA vaccines, so that was really interesting.

Keeping up with family and friends, and I've just taken up knitting; I'm quite pleased with myself. My grandmother used to knit, and I suddenly had this hankering to start knitting. I'm halfway through a jumper.

I recently participated in a sponsored walk for cancer research.

At the moment, I’m reading Evelina by Frances Burney. She was an 18^th-century English novelist who was one of Jane Austen's inspirations. It's Jane Austen's 250th anniversary this year. Burney wrote some of the first novels by a woman that were published in England.

I like Austen. I like anything Georgian, really, I'm quite interested in that period of history,  going to exhibitions and that kind of thing.

I went on holiday to Italy, the Amalfi Coast. I've been before and it was amazing. It's so beautiful. It really is. I went once and I was like, “I'm definitely coming back here.” I think Italy is my favorite country outside the UK.

Everything's about China at the moment. There’s an absolute explosion going on the Chinese industry. And not just China, also South Korea. There's a huge amount of work going on there. How will the Western industries react and respond to that? And especially in Europe, which is getting much less competitive.

With the tariff threats and MFN, everything's a bit haywire at the moment, so it will be interesting to see what happens with deals this year, the impact on that and IPOs.

Obesity, obviously, is massive. I don't think that's going away. Years ago, we were writing about fen-phen and its withdrawal. Then I spent ages writing about this drug called Acomplia that acted on cannabinoid receptors and it was OK, but then they had to take it off the market as well because it had adverse psychological effects. With those drugs, they were looking for about 5% weight loss and 10% was seen as really good.

And now we've got drugs with like 23% to 25% weight loss. The difference is incredible.

And they seem, so far, relatively safe. So that's another big thing. And developers are looking at obesity drugs for other indications like osteoarthritis. Obviously, if you lose weight, you’re going to have less pressure on your joints. That makes sense. But then they're also looking at these drugs for Alzheimer's and other conditions. So I think we're just scratching the surface.