Profile / Life Sciences / Vol. XII
Paul Eccles
A molecular biologist who now spends his working hours telling pharmaceutical companies which molecule in their pipeline is actually worth the trouble.
A molecular biologist who now spends his working hours telling pharmaceutical companies which molecule in their pipeline is actually worth the trouble.
Paul Eccles runs Basis Health, the life sciences division of a London-headquartered insight consultancy called Basis Global, out of an office in New York. He got the job in September 2022. The company's chief executive, Rune Mortensen, went through an impressive candidate pool and picked him. This is how these announcements always read, and yet in Eccles's case there is a slightly unusual detail: the man doing the pharma strategy work has a PhD in molecular biology, from the University of Birmingham, with prior study at Brunel.
The subtext of hiring a molecular biologist to run a health strategy practice is that the science is, at some level, actually going to get looked at. Pharma clients tend to have opinions on this. They have generally been asked, at some earlier stage of their commercial life, to explain the mechanism of action of an early-stage asset to a room of MBAs, and it has generally not gone well.
Eccles arrived at Basis after roughly fifteen years of working through the standard hierarchy of Anglo-American life sciences consulting. He started as a research executive at Opinion Health. He spent about seven years at Cello Health, ending up as director of business development. He became a Partner at BluePrint Research Group. Then he was a Partner in the Strategic Advisory pillar at Trinity Life Sciences, leading a team of more than thirty people across the United States and the United Kingdom. The through-line, if you squint, is that each move traded scope for depth and then swapped back for scope again.
What he actually does, day to day, is described by his own biography in a shopping list of consulting nouns: commercialization strategy and execution, market landscaping, opportunity assessment, early asset prioritization, business development and licensing, platform forecasting, portfolio positioning and prioritization. The phrase you hear least often at dinner parties is portfolio positioning. The phrase that determines the most money in pharma is also portfolio positioning. This is the general shape of the industry.
Basis Global itself is worth a paragraph. It calls itself an insight consultancy. Its client roster includes Google, Meta, Tesco, and L'Oreal. Its methodology blends quantitative and qualitative research with AI, behavioural science, cultural insight and design thinking - the sort of list that appears on the About page of every firm competing for the same accounts. Its differentiation is that it has four specialist units - Consumer, B2B, Health, and Organic Intelligence - and that the Health unit, which is Eccles's unit, is new enough to still be shaped by whoever runs it.
Whoever runs it, at the moment, is Eccles.
Basis Health has brought an innovative and exciting approach to global healthcare research. I'm incredibly excited to join Basis Health's brilliant team.- Paul Eccles, on his appointment, September 2022
Self-reported disciplines from Eccles's public professional biography. Bars are illustrative of stated focus areas, not audited billable hours.
Data providers regularly conflate Eccles's employer - Basis Global, the London insight firm - with Basis Technologies, the Chicago ad-tech company formerly known as Centro. Same word, different world. His email address ends in basisresearch.com, which does help.
At Trinity his team of thirty spanned the US and UK. At Basis he sits in New York while the mothership sits in London. The commute is done by Slack.
In summer 2023 he used LinkedIn - a professional network not often used for anything genuinely useful - to promote the Be The Match bone marrow registry. It was the sort of post that does not get algorithmic reward and is written anyway.
Basis Global works for Google, Meta, Tesco, and L'Oreal. Eccles works for the pharma and biotech end of that client base - a different building on the same campus.
Basis Health has brought an innovative and exciting approach to global healthcare research.September 29, 2022 - joining announcement
There is not a great deal of Eccles on the public record beyond appointment quotes and LinkedIn posts. This is unusual only in the sense that most executives at his level have accidentally become semi-public figures. Eccles has not. The strategy consulting business rewards being useful in private.
A healthcare strategy consultant with a PhD in molecular biology who leads Basis Health, the life sciences division of London-based insight consultancy Basis Global, from New York.
New York City, where he runs the US practice of Basis Health.
He was a Partner in Trinity Life Sciences' Strategic Advisory division, leading a 30+ person team across the US and UK. Before that he held roles at BluePrint Research Group, Cello Health, and Opinion Health.
Commercialization strategy, market landscaping, opportunity assessment, early asset prioritization, business development and licensing, platform forecasting, and portfolio positioning.
September 2022, as Managing Partner of the newly launched Basis Health division in New York.