Healthy Momentum

As Lilly marks its sesquicentennial, the ACCJ President’s Circle member focuses on what comes next for Japan.

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It has been 150 years since American pharmacist, chemist, and businessman Eli Lilly founded Eli Lilly and Company in 1876. It was just over a decade after the end of the Civil War that the former Union Army officer turned his attention to creating innovative medicines of the highest quality. A century and a half later, the company that started in Indianapolis has become one of the world’s leaders.

In Japan, where ACCJ President’s Circle member Eli Lilly Japan K.K. has operated for more than half a century, the milestone is being treated as a responsibility to shape what comes next. The country is one of Lilly’s most important markets, thanks to its world-class scientific capabilities, highly skilled healthcare professionals, and exceptionally high standards of patient care.

The next chapter for Lilly in Japan starts with building the manufacturing muscle and partnerships with government, academia, and the tech world to close the gaps in diagnosis and access to ensure that medicines get to the patients who need them most.

That also means putting technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to work to accelerate scientific discovery and improve how medicines are developed, manufactured, and delivered.

The ambition is to become the most trusted and impactful medicine company in Japan by 2030.

“Our success will be measured not only by business growth, but by the lasting difference we make for patients, the healthcare system, and society,” the company told The ACCJ Journal. “Our legacy is what we do next.”

Bridging Leadership

That next chapter arrives alongside a change at the top. In July 2026, Karla Alcazar became president and representative director of Lilly Japan, succeeding Simone Thomsen, who had led the organization since 2019.

Thomsen described Japan’s healthcare sector as having reached an important turning point during her tenure. The country’s strengths remain considerable, she said, including universal healthcare coverage, highly skilled professionals, strong scientific institutions, and a deep commitment to quality. All this comes as the healthcare environment has grown more complex with an aging population and a growing burden of chronic disease, which have raised the need for innovation.

While Lilly’s mission remains to bring innovative medicines to Japanese patients, continued uncertainty around pricing and reimbursement policies makes it increasingly challenging to sustain investment, accelerate innovation, and ensure timely patient access, she added. Going forward, a more predictable policy environment will be essential to support both innovation and long-term healthcare sustainability. 

For Thomsen, that means integrating Japan into global development, strengthening the company’s manufacturing network and supply resilience, raising awareness in areas such as obesity disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and building partnerships that help patients move from awareness to diagnosis and appropriate care.

She was especially proud to see Lilly Japan’s role extend beyond medicines, working with local governments, medical societies, and patient organizations to promote earlier diagnosis and build more connected care pathways.

“The progress achieved over these years was not the work of one leader,” Thomsen stressed. “It was created together by our employees and partners, and that shared journey is what I value most.”

Alcazar arrives in Kobe after nearly 20 years with Lilly. With most of those spent in Latin America and the United States, she brings with her a perspective shaped by very different markets.

What stands out to her in Japan is the strength of its universal healthcare system, the scientific rigor of its medical community, the emphasis on quality and safety, and the discipline with which organizations execute.

Set against a rapidly aging population, issues such as healthy longevity, chronic disease management, sustainable access, and earlier intervention have become especially urgent.

“My experience has taught me that sustainable progress requires both strong execution and collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem,” Alcazar explained. “I come to Japan with curiosity and humility.”

She said that the greatest opportunity is to expand early and consistent access to innovation for more people in Japan.

Through deeper collaboration and responsible use of data and technology, Japan can further improve early diagnosis, personalize care, strengthen treatment pathways, and continue to play an important role in global medical innovation, she added.

The harder task, in Alcazar’s view, is that scientific innovation alone does not automatically lead to better outcomes.

Patients can still face stigma, limited disease awareness, uneven access, and complex care pathways. The system needs a predictable, sustainable environment that recognizes the long-term value of innovation.

“We must work across sectors to remove barriers, strengthen the patient voice, and build an ecosystem in which advances in science can translate into meaningful improvements in people’s lives,” she said.

Confronting Obesity Disease

Nowhere is that approach more visible than in Lilly’s push on obesity disease, a chronic, progressive condition shaped by biology, genetics, psychology, the environment, and social circumstances.

The disease is linked to more than 200 serious complications, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, and liver disease.

Despite this, the condition remains widely misunderstood as simply a matter of personal responsibility or willpower. This misconception often creates stigma that can keep people from recognizing it or seeking care at all.

Japan’s aging population and its barriers to diagnosis and treatment make the country a particular focus for Lilly. Its role extends beyond developing medicines, the company said, to working with medical societies, healthcare providers, and policymakers to strengthen disease understanding, treatment pathways, and evidence generation, so that people can move from awareness to appropriate action.

Digital healthcare is central to that effort. The company argued that the biggest challenge is not simply access to treatment, since many people living with obesity disease never reach the point of seeking medical care in the first place. Earlier recognition can encourage people to seek professional advice before the disease leads to more serious complications.

Online medical consultations can help reduce psychological barriers to seeking care and improve access to appropriate healthcare. Lilly recognizes the potential of digital health solutions to enhance patient access to care and support better health outcomes.

Digital tools can also narrow regional gaps in access. They can connect patients, regardless of location, to appropriate care, since specialists and experienced providers are not evenly distributed across the country.

Looking beyond individual medicines, the next frontier is a more personalized approach with integrated treatment decisions reflecting disease severity, related conditions, patient needs and preferences, as well as old-fashioned clinical judgment.

Earlier recognition, stronger disease awareness, reduced stigma, and better-coordinated care across the healthcare ecosystem, the company argued, all matter as much as the medicines themselves in improving long-term outcomes.

The goal is to ensure people living with obesity disease can recognize the disease earlier, seek help without fear of stigma, and access the right care at the right time.

Lilly said Japan has an opportunity to build a more patient-centered ecosystem for obesity disease care that combines in-person care, digital health services, disease awareness programs, and community-based support. No single organization can achieve this alone.

Collaboration among healthcare professionals, policymakers, patient communities, academia, and industry, the company said, will be essential to enable earlier diagnosis, smoother referral pathways, and equitable access to evidence-based care.

Applied Intelligence

The other pillar of Lilly’s forward-looking push is the ever-growing field of AI, which is becoming a foundational capability across the full medicine value chain for the company rather than a standalone technology initiative.

In early discovery, AI allows scientists to analyze complex biology and chemistry at a scale and speed that were previously impossible. Its reach extends well beyond early discovery, supporting clinical-trial design, regulatory-document preparation, manufacturing quality, supply-chain resilience, and more precise patient engagement.

That integration was reinforced recently with the launch of a Co-Innovation AI Lab alongside Nvidia, pairing Lilly’s drug-development know-how with Nvidia’s computing horsepower.

The goal is to reinvent how scientific discovery happens by pairing AI-driven computational research with real lab experimentation so hypotheses get generated, tested, and refined in a continuous loop, far faster than before.

Ultimately, the company said, the purpose of the collaboration is to help address some of the most difficult challenges in medicine and accelerate scientific breakthroughs that can improve patients’ lives around the world.

AI will be a powerful accelerator of drug discovery and healthcare, according to the company. But it’s ultimately people who make the breakthroughs that improve patients’ lives. Curiosity, scientific judgment, creativity, and accountability remain fundamentally human traits.

As the company put it, AI does not replace scientists but, rather, augments human expertise. Scientists remain at the center of every decision, while AI helps analyze complex biology, generate insights, and explore possibilities at a scale that was previously impossible.

Over the long term, Lilly expects the greatest impact to come from connecting AI across a medicine’s entire life cycle: better trial design and patient selection in development, improved quality control and planning in manufacturing and supply, and, in research, a far wider exploration of biological and chemical possibilities.

For patients, the company noted, the ultimate value will not be the technology itself but what it enables: better scientific decisions, a greater probability of successful development, faster learning, and more reliable supply.

For organizations using AI, the company said that those who empower their people to use it responsibly and effectively will create the greatest value.

The Value of a Network

Lilly credits its ACCJ President’s Circle membership with a distinct role in supporting its work. The company described it as an important platform for dialogue, partnership, and shared learning across industries, one that allows it to engage with business leaders, policymakers, and the US Embassy,
Tokyo on issues touching both healthcare and the broader US–Japan economic relationship.

That matters, Lilly said, because many of today’s healthcare challenges cannot be solved by the pharmaceutical industry alone. Through the ACCJ, the company contributes its expertise to policy discussions, learns from other sectors, and helps develop collaborative initiatives spanning healthcare innovation, digital transformation, sustainability, inclusion, and women’s empowerment.

The premium membership also gives Lilly’s employees a chance to broaden their professional networks and engage with initiatives beyond the pharmaceutical sector.

“Ultimately,” the company said, “the ACCJ helps us strengthen trust and collaboration and advance our goal of creating a healthier, more innovative, and sustainable future in Japan.”