Presidential Leadership Series features trustee and former Takeda CEO Christophe Weber
Christophe Weber, a university trustee and Husky parent, was the guest in the 2026-2027 academic year’s first Presidential Leadership Series event.
Curiosity was the key this week as Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun and Christophe Weber, former president and CEO of Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company, Ltd. joined forces to discuss the future of biotechnology.
Weber cited inquisitiveness as a key attribute for future employees in the pharmaceutical industry. And he got a good demonstration of how members of the Northeastern community embody that trait.
“We have so many interesting and fascinating questions about what you have been dealing with,” Aoun told Weber, a university trustee and Husky parent who was featured Wednesday as the first guest in the 2026-2027 academic year’s Presidential Leadership Series event on Northeastern’s Boston campus.
The series showcases fireside chats and discussions hosted by Aoun and brings leaders who are shaping the future to campus. Past guests have included trailblazers from eBay, LinkedIn, and Li & Fung shipping company.
Weber led Takeda for 12 years, becoming the first non-Japanese executive to lead the 240-year-old business, and transforming it into a global pharmaceutical giant that Weber said is “unrecognizable compared to 10 years ago.”
During his tenure, Weber established a research hub and headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., telling Aoun he was drawn by the Boston area’s “vibrant” biotech ecosystem of universities, startups, venture capital and research.
“We decided to pivot and to focus on research and to become a truly innovative company,” Weber said. “If you want to do that, you want to really be where science happens.”
But Weber said transformation in the biotech industry continues.
Research incorporates robots and artificial intelligence, requiring less “wet lab” space – or laboratories where scientists handle liquids, chemicals, drugs, and biological samples – and more space for computing, Weber said.
China has spent years developing a biotech ecosystem with substantial public funding and support, Weber said, and has become a competitor with the United States in the sector – able to develop innovative chemical compounds (or molecules, as Weber called them) that can be developed into drugs faster and cheaper than the United States.
“They have been able to be very good at generating molecules, and they are also leveraging a very significant number of PhDs, and so they have a very large workforce,” Weber said.
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China’s large population and many hospitals also enable its companies to generate clinical data quickly, Weber added.
Meanwhile, the U.S. spends two times more than any country in the world on healthcare as a percentage of gross domestic product, “and you don’t get two-times better outcomes,” Weber said.
While Americans may applaud parity in drug costs between the United States and Europe, Weber predicted that this would lead to U.S. pharmaceutical companies halving their budgets for research and development and possibly bypassing European markets to remain profitable.
The winner in that scenario? Also China.
“I think that would be very unfortunate because the reality is that medicines are useful everywhere, so we need to find the right economic equation,” Weber said.
So, Aoun presented a hypothetical scenario.
“Tomorrow morning you launch a company – a pharmaceutical company, biotech – Would you do it in the United States or would you do it in China?,” the president asked.
Despite the competition, the U.S. still has the lead, the CEO replied.
He noted that 90% of the new drugs in the world have been discovered in the U.S., while China has 0.2% market share. And ultimately, Weber said, it doesn’t matter whether a molecule comes from China or the United States or Europe.
“What matters is how you develop it,” Weber said. “How do you leverage the Chinese ecosystem and the U.S. ecosystem in terms of its commercial future?”
Weber also cited AI as a way to “neutralize” China’s competitive advantage in clinical drug development… as long as researchers can ask the right question, which he acknowledged isn’t always so easy.
AI will give you an answer, no matter what the query, whereas humans can tell you that you’ve asked a bad question, Weber said.
The Northeastern community came through with good questions.
Students and faculty joined Aoun in querying Weber, covering topics such as navigating international regulatory and data privacy differences among countries (and even states); how technology can be used to ensure that patients are actually taking their medications or completing other therapies; what the tipping point would be for fixing the U.S. healthcare system; the pros and cons of drug advertisements on television; and even the role of lobbyists and AI to help drugs get better regulation clearance.
Aoun seemed pleased with the answers as well.
“If we had asked you the same questions when you were an active CEO, would you have answered differently?” the president joked.
Weber shook his head
“No? Okay, great,” Aoun said, laughing.
