Ferring's New Chief Falk Talks
Executive Summary
Ferring announced this morning (Oct. 31) that Michel Pettigrew is retiring as president of the executive board and will be succeeded by CSO Per Falk. The two spoke to Scrip recently and outlined the Swiss-based firm's future strategy.
Ferring Pharmaceuticals AS has plumped for a scientist – Per Falk – to take over the reins when Michel Pettigrew steps down as president of the executive board at the end of the year and the Swede is keen to consolidate the company's leading role in women's healthcare and expand in new areas by embracing advances in gene therapy and the microbiome.
Pettigrew and Falk met up with Scrip in London recently to talk about plans for the future for Ferring which has made considerable progress under the former's leadership. Pettigrew joined the Swiss firm in 2001, helping to take the company from revenues of €345m to nearly €2bn today and moving Ferring into the top 50 of global pharma firms.
Pettigrew noted that the company had been extremely successful in investing in established medicines such as Menopur (human menopausal gonadotrophin; HMG) for assisted reproduction, desmopressin for nocturia and mesalazine for ulcerative colitis and improving formulations, making them more convenient to use and better adapting them for patients' needs. However, "too much of the R&D spend went on life cycle management and not enough on new molecules but when Per came in, he made sure that balance shifted."
Falk joined Ferring as chief science officer at the beginning of 2015 after 12 years at Novo Nordisk AS where he held a number of key posts, including head of biopharmaceuticals research. Since his arrival, the company's R&D spend has jumped from below 14% of sales to 17% and Falk has been instrumental in transforming Ferring's development focus.
The firm's main speciality is reproductive medicine, an area which has been "tremendously under-invested in," Falk said. There are a lot of "completely white spaces" for more investigation and it is important to remember that "fertility not just a woman's problem, 50% of the problem is men" and male infertility represents a huge unmet medical need.
He argued that the model for solving fertility problems "has been stale for decades and the number of women being helped has not increased significantly in the last ten years and neither has the number of clinics dedicated to IVF increased much." In Europe, 4%-5% of children are born using assisted reproductive technologies, while in China and the US, the figure is about 1%.
Falk said that the success rate of IVF is still relatively low, and "it is a laborious and invasive process for women to go through; it is not completely risk-free." Ferring "has placed a stake in the ground" to improve safety and efficacy of existing products and develop better ones, he said, citing a recently-inked pact with US women's health genomics company Celmatix Inc. to help generate new insights into ovarian biology. (Also see "Ferring Plots Genomics Path With Celmatix Pact" - Scrip, 30 Aug, 2018.)
Falk said that "as a leader in a particular field you have to explore." The more dependent you are on a certain area, the more you have to make sure you are at the forefront. To keep being the leader, you have to be first at everything and not miss out on anything. If you stick to your old ways, the worst thing that can happen is someone disrupts your model and then you have nothing." (Also see "Interview: Ferring Forges Ahead With mAbs For Reproductive Meds " - Scrip, 15 Feb, 2018.)
With Ferring and fertility, Falk told Scrip that "technology-wise, there is no risk we will not be prepared to take to make sure we are the leader and the first in everything. We need to be the go-to company for anybody with a good idea in fertility – male or female, obstetrics, safer pregnancies - Ferring should be the first name that crops up in anyone's brain who has an idea in this space."
The company is expanding in other areas, most notably into the microbiome drug development space through its recent acquisition of the US firm
Rebiotix Inc.. It is an area of huge interest for Falk, who noted that scientific activity began 50-60 years ago, then momentum started building 20 years ago, "which is when you get the hype and you are blessed with ignorance so you have lots of interesting data that takes you into tons of different directions."
Falk cited his friend and mentor Jeffrey Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and a pioneer in microbiome research who told him that "we have a problem because any area that has more review articles written than original papers is overheated and if an original paper ends up in The Economist, The Times or the New York Times and is described as an interesting new frontier in healthcare, we also have a problem because it is being pushed too fast." (Also see "Ferring Looks For Early Microbiome Wins, But Willing To Do Heavy Lifting" - Scrip, 2 May, 2017.)
However, while microbiome strategies were previously based on "hope and promise, now we can see that with the microbiome, there is a tremendous opportunity to change healthcare, without a doubt it is a new frontier but that does not necessarily mean it will be faster or easier. In fact it will be more complicated than drug development is at present because these critters are alive and if they don't live, they don't work."
The acquisition of Rebiotix in April gave Ferring a Phase III non-antibiotic treatment for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection - RBX2660 - which is a contender to be the first approved human microbiome product. Initial readouts are expected in the first half of next year and Falk believes that the first therapeutics will come to the market in the next two-four years, as much work needs to be done in terms of regulatory frameworks for these products and the field will develop relatively slowly because of the complexity of the human microbiome.
One thing that Falk can rely on is time and financial backing to drive Ferring's new projects, such as its microbiome efforts and the recent move into gene therapy with a late-stage licensing deal signed in May this year for a novel bladder cancer treatment from Finland's FKD Therapies OY. The Saint-Prex-headquartered company is privately owned with Frederik Paulsen as the current chairman (his father founded Ferring). Pettigrew said that for the chairman "financial motives are secondary," with the firm paying much more attention to science and patients than feeling the need to demonstrate double-digit quarterly earnings growth. (Also see "Ferring Makes Foray Into Gene Therapy With FKD Pact" - Scrip, 3 May, 2018.)
Ferring operates in 60 countries and while it is a profitable business, earnings could be significantly higher if the firm followed the big pharma model and concentrated on the US and the top five markets in Europe and not much else. However, Pettigrew stressed that it simply was not the way Ferring works and it wants to have a presence where its patients are.
Falk echoed Pettigrew's stance on the Ferring philosophy and said the decisions were taken principally on therapeutic rather than financial grounds. He concluded by saying that in future, Ferring will not shy away from risky projects and would focus on new technologies. "We will not just perfect therapies in categories where we dominate – we will enter new categories addressing entirely new categories of patients."