By Business & Finance 
Pictured: Dr Steve Cutler, CEO, Icon plc; Photo Credit: Andres Poveda
In March 2017, Dr Steve Cutler was appointed CEO of ICON plc — a healthcare intelligence and clinical research organisation. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer for three years having joined ICON as Group President, Clinical Research Services in 2011. Cutler has been a member of the ICON plc board since 2015.
Our customers face an increasingly complex environment and challenges in selecting the right partnerships and suppliers for their clinical trials.
What are your main priorities and goals in your role?
ICON is a world-leading healthcare intelligence and clinical research organisation. From molecule to medicine, we advance clinical research providing outsourced services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and government and public health organisations.
Therefore, my priority is ensuring that ICON is firmly positioned as the CRO and healthcare intelligence partner of choice to our customers, thereby bringing their drugs and devices to market quickly and safely. In order to do that, there are a couple of things we are particularly focussed on.
This includes working as a trusted partner to our customers in a way that really drives progress. Our focus is on working in a truly collaborative way, being focused on solutions and building our innovative capabilities so that we can develop better ways of doing things.
Our customers face an increasingly complex environment and challenges in selecting the right partnerships and suppliers for their clinical trials.
ICON offers the most comprehensive suite of integrated clinical development services in the industry. My focus is on building that leading capability – getting the right team in place, having the right game plan in place and executing on that efficiently.
In doing so, ICON will continue to achieve its goal of playing a leading role in evolving clinical research with better data, science and technology.
What are your biggest challenges as CEO?
ICON has over 41,000 people in over 50 locations. One of things I thoroughly enjoy in my role as CEO is meeting and engaging with our people (both in person and virtually) right across our business. At the end of last year, for example, I visited a number of our offices in Asia Pacific – in India, China, South Korea, Japan and Australia. Overall, we employ over 8,000 people in the region. The insight and feedback that I get from these conversations and from visiting our facilities is hugely constructive. I invest considerable time in this, but always challenge myself to do more in this regard.
Communication – ongoing and consistent – is important in fostering and growing this amongst our employees.
How do you keep your team/staff motivated?
I think it’s fair to say that one of the key characteristics of ICON as an organisation is the commitment and motivation our people have to supporting our customers, and ultimately working to improve patients’ lives. They are really invested in what we are trying to achieve as an organisation, which is something that really motivates me.
Communication – ongoing and consistent – is important in fostering and growing this amongst our employees.
In addition to me as CEO, and the rest of the executive leadership team, our people leaders are critical in this regard. Those people with responsibility for teams right across the business have a hugely important role. And so for me, meeting, engaging and interacting with them, to make sure the people understand our company’s vision, strategy, culture and values, and that they have the opportunity to fulfil their professional goals is hugely important.
For example, late last year, we held dedicated events right cross our business – in Asia Pacific, EMEA and the Americas, where we collectively discussed the importance of our values of collaboration, agility, integrity and inclusion.
What are the challenges facing the industry going forward?
Notwithstanding the persistent macroeconomic challenges that all businesses are dealing with, overall, I believe that the outlook for our industry is positive.
There are certain challenges we can point to – such as the challenging funding environment for biotechs or indeed the need for biotech and pharmaceutical companies to improve efficiencies and improve ROI, from an R&D perspective.
That’s where ICON can help. Our role as the clinical research organisation of choice is to support them and I believe we are well positioned to do that.
What new trends are emerging in your industry, and how has the COVID-19 crisis affected your business/sector?
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on our industry. How we operated changed fundamentally, and how we operated clinical trials changed. There was a huge shift from traditional trials to more agile and remote trials that were ultimately more efficient and more patient centric.
This has created opportunity – while it is possible that the industry could revert to the traditional type of trial, I am hopeful that we can take a step forward and embrace change. This will allow us to decentralise trial strategies and monitor patients using wearables, for example, which will allow for more diversity in clinical trials.
In my view, if that transpires, we will save more lives and improve people’s quality of life more quickly.
Are there any major changes you would like to see in your sector?
There was a move to a more partnership-centric and collaborative way of working in the pandemic and I think the opportunity now is to build on that. Decentralised and hybrid trials are an obvious example of that progress.
There is now the opportunity to make important progress against critical goals, that all of us within the industry have – sponsors and clinical research organisations alike. Examples include increased efficiencies, increased diversity, more patient-centric care and increased access to care, among others.
By working together in this collaborative way, we are going to best realise the advancements that can be made against these goals.
We all have a role to play here, and collaboration between industry and academia will be hugely important to help build that talent pipeline.
As an employer are you finding any skill gaps in the market?
Like very many industries, the clinical research one is also operating in a very tight labour market. For those of us in the pharmaceutical industry, building a diverse graduate pool of talented and ambitious STEM professionals who can help to ensure the future success of the life sciences industry is critical.
We all have a role to play here, and collaboration between industry and academia will be hugely important to help build that talent pipeline.
It’s the reason why, at ICON, we invest in partnerships with numerous universities – in Ireland and beyond – on leadership development and mentorship programmes, for example, in addition to STEM scholarship programmes.
The current talent landscape also highlights the importance of looking at how we can do things better and more efficiently. One example of where we are doing this has been to address the increasing demand for Clinical Research Associates (CRAs) – a significant issue facing the clinical research industry currently.
To respond, we’ve implemented our CRA remote hub. This provides our customers access to highly experienced and specialised CRAs. The hub CRAs are located in different locations and time zones, selected based on where clinical expertise is available and where the infrastructure supports a remote hub. They collaborate and work closely with in-country travelling CRAs who are on the ground in the country where a trial is taking place. As a result, sponsors get access to the support they need, for extended times and in an effective and cost-efficient way.
Two things spring to mind. Firstly, believe and trust in the capability of the team. No one person can do it all. Time and time again my experience has shown that diverse teams drive great performance.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given, or would give, in business?
Two things spring to mind. Firstly, believe and trust in the capability of the team. No one person can do it all. Time and time again my experience has shown that diverse teams drive great performance.
And secondly, everybody gets knocked down and makes mistakes – what’s important is if you got back up again? How we respond in times of challenge is often more defining for us as individuals, and indeed as organisations.
What have been your highlights in business over the past year?
It has been a hugely positive year for ICON. We’ve forged significant customer partnerships and supported them on important new medicines; we’ve introduced new solutions and services, and overall performed strongly in our marketplace.
At a broad level, following the significant acquisition of PRA Health Sciences in July 2021, a real highlight for me over the last year has been seeing teams come together right across the business to work collaboratively to realise the potential that this combination offered us.
As a result of their hard work, we now have broader and deeper service, geographic and therapeutic service offerings, and expansive data driven healthcare technology. We are delivering enhanced solutions for all customers, increasing access to patients and reducing development time and cost.
What’s next for your company?
We’re really clear on what we what to achieve. We want to improve the lives of patients by accelerating the development of our customers’ drugs and devices through innovative solutions.
And we’re really clear on how we will do that. It’s by achieving our vision of being the healthcare intelligence partner of choice by delivering industry leading solutions and best in class performance in clinical development.
This will be achieved by our people, of course, and their experience and breadth of capabilities. But it’s also our work practices – how we look for innovative and better ways of doing things, along with the innovative technologies, that will drive progress for our clients, and indeed the industry overall.
