At the State of Possible Conference, four experts will examine the price and value questions the industry doesn’t always ask itself in public.
The science has never been more promising. The questions surrounding how the industry prices, proves, and defends its work have never been louder.
That’s the context for one of the most substantive sessions at this year’s State of Possible Conference: The Price of Innovation: An Honest Conversation. This panel on March 26 brings together voices from health economics, venture investment, and policy to examine questions the industry doesn’t always ask itself in public.
The timing is deliberate. With pricing pressure intensifying on multiple fronts and public trust in the industry near a generational low, the conversation about how we define and demonstrate value has moved well beyond market access. Gallup’s 2025 survey found just one in ten Americans views the industry’s work very positively. That touches something deeper than pricing strategy. It touches the industry’s credibility, its relationship with patients, and its long-term social license to operate.
No One Agrees on What Value Means
Ask four experts what a drug is “worth” and you’ll get four different answers. That’s not a failure of the field. It may be the most honest thing anyone working in it can say right now.
Value is subjective—and the industry is only beginning to reckon with that. Melanie Whittington, Managing Director of the Leerink Center for Pharmaeconomics, sees health economic modeling as an underused, but growing tool. It’s one that quantifies what a therapy actually delivers across a patient’s care journey and can ground pricing conversations in outcomes rather than precedent. As scrutiny intensifies and transparency demands grow, she expects that to change. The question is whether the industry gets ahead of it or gets pulled along.
There are early signs it can. Brian Reid, Principal at Reid Strategic, points to the gene therapy and Alzheimer’s categories as evidence that the industry knows how to lead with value when it has to. Companies in those spaces were building entirely new markets, which forced a level of economic transparency that most launches never attempt. The result, Reid argues, is a smarter conversation: one that goes beyond price to address economic surplus, downstream burden, and questions of who pays and when. It’s a model worth examining more broadly.
Part of the difficulty, argues Chris Garabedian, Venture Portfolio Manager at Perceptive Advisors, is that the industry has long evaluated drug costs in a silo—measuring a therapy’s price against other drugs rather than against the full cost of not treating effectively. Hospitalizations. Inpatient procedures. Staffing and infrastructure. He sees that reframing as one of the biggest remaining gaps in how the field thinks about innovation economics.
When Demonstrating Value Isn’t Enough
Strong clinical data and solid health economics don’t guarantee a patient ever sees the therapy.
John Stanford, Partner and CEO of Novel Strategies, has watched it happen. Step therapy requirements. Prior authorization delays. Formulary exclusions. The reimbursement infrastructure has a way of undermining the scientific case at exactly the moment it matters most. “You spend years building the science, you make the clinical case, you demonstrate value by almost any reasonable standard,” Stanford has observed, “and then the infrastructure of the coverage and reimbursement system can undermine all of it.”
His counsel to early-stage companies is direct: treating value and access as a launch-phase problem is a mistake the industry can’t afford to keep making. The policy and reimbursement environment now shapes investment viability long before a therapy reaches patients. Companies that understand that from the start are the ones positioned to navigate it.
The Worth Debate
Whittington, Garabedian, Stanford, and Reid bring genuinely different vantage points to questions that don’t have clean answers. That range is what makes the session worth a spot on the agenda.
Reid frames the stakes plainly. There is a persistent myth that talking openly about price and value at launch is unnecessarily risky. But the avoidance strategy has costs of its own. Years of industry silence on pricing have contributed to a reputational and policy crisis that now threatens the ecosystem itself. Most Americans don’t know how medicines are priced, and in that vacuum, they assume the worst. The only way out, Reid contends, is a renewed commitment to justifying price based on value delivered.
The conversation about pricing and value has no shortage of opinions. This panel is a chance to hear from people who work through these questions every day.
The Price of Innovation: An Honest Conversation starts at 1:20 PM on March 26 at the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport, as part of the 2026 State of Possible Conference. Register now.
