Reading the room: John Lepore on bringing home pharma deals
Profound CEO uses pharma experience to carve deals; managing the product-platform tension; and more
In an environment where everybody hurts, it helps for biotech CEOs to understand the pressures driving pharmas, investors and other key players if they want to secure deals and financings that will help them succeed.
That’s how John Lepore, CEO of Profound Therapeutics Inc. and former head of research at GSK plc (LSE:GSK; NYSE:GSK), is navigating his early stage company through this capital-constrained era as he builds it from the ground up.
Speaking on The BioCentury Show, Lepore discussed how he approaches partnering, how he manages the need to both build a platform and generate products, and the science driving the company’s technology.
“It helps to know why the other party is asking the question. It helps to know how your answer is going to be interpreted.”
Profound announced a deal with Novartis AG (SIX:NOVN; NYSE:NVS) in June to find new targets and develop therapies in cardiovascular disease, and last year announced a similar one with Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) in obesity. Another big one will be announced soon, said Lepore.
Lepore said that despite the harsh funding outlook for biotechs that might put them on the weaker side in a buyer’s market for deals, understanding the mindset of potential partners is crucial. “On the pharma side, there’s [also] financial pressures,” he said.
With the need to deliver on the proximal pipeline, pharma budgets are being pushed, creating downward pressure on the research budget. That creates a situation where pharma R&D organizations are looking for targets, projects and molecules that could be accessed via a BD partnership without needing as big an internal group, said Lepore.
Having been on the pharma side of the table at GSK has been “absolutely invaluable,” said Lepore. “It helps to know why the other party is asking the question. It helps to know how your answer is going to be interpreted, and it helps to know how to present things in a way that is attractive to them — not to oversell it, but rather to put it in the terms that they’re making the decision on.”
Lepore acknowledged that although the fundamental basis of Profound is to build a platform, there’s continual demands to come up with products.
“Investors have literally said, do you have any IND-ready molecules? Well, I introduced this as a target discovery company,” said Lepore. “But their pressures are to find things that have high value that they could monetize pretty quickly.”
Still, Lepore said that there are some tenets to guide building a platform play — one or two products, isn’t enough. “The point of a platform is to be sustainable.”
“If you spend all of your money and time up front on perfecting a platform that can’t get to more than one or two medicines, or takes way too long to get there, that gap is very hard to bridge. And that’s where I think a lot of platforms run out of money, they run out of energy, and they run out of interest,” said Lepore.
That means very early on demonstrating the opportunity for multiple medicines with specific programs. The partnerships with pharmas are an important part of that, said Lepore.
Lepore described the science behind Profound’s platform, which uses both wet biology and multiomics for finding new targets and proteins that were left behind by the Human Genome Project; how AI/ML plays into the company’s strategy; and the kinds of skill sets needed as the company evolves.