France-based pharmaceutical group Pierre Fabre’s recently launched open innovation initiative, Pierre Fabre Fund for Innovation, will focus on collaboration with biotech companies in the early clinical testing stage, Laurent Audoly, the company’s pharmaceuticals R&D director, told Global Corporate Venturing.
The fund will look to provide financial and strategic support to biotech companies that are in the early stages of clinical development, or within two years of reaching that point. Audoly, who is managing partner of the program, joined Pierre Fabre in late 2014 with a brief to reengineer its R&D business model, and the fund’s launch is part of a strategy to externalise R&D to access innovation wherever it occurs.
“So this fund really fits into that strategy over time where its objective is to align with our R&D objectives and bring innovative, disruptive therapies as quickly as possible to patients and their families,” Audoly said. “The main objective of the fund is of course to build win-win ROIs for our partners and ourselves but the number one objective is to bring forward medicine as quickly as possible to patients.
“With that in mind, the rest is simply tactics. We have a brand, we have been in the oncology business for 30 years, we have products on the market and a commercial organisation, [as well as] regulatory, manufacturing and R&D organisations. We have all the elements across the pharma value chain to really help pull together value but also to de-risk assets with external partners.”
Pierre Fabre’s strategy involves finding promising oncology, onco-dermatology or dermatology companies it can work with as they gather clinical data, providing its resources to help the companies as they progress. If the data is sufficiently good the firm may well look to invest more thoroughly.
“What I would really like to see happen is that we identify a partner that is working on an asset or assets that fit our strategy, but those assets are perhaps not ready for primetime,” Audoly explained. “And we basically work together on a set of data that crystallises what good would look like.
“During the period of time where the partner generates the data, we get to know the team and build trust on both ends, and we get to see the data being generated so at the end of the collaboration we are ready to pull the trigger or not on a deal.
“That could be an option deal on the asset or taking an equity position in the company. Our objective is not to take board seats but we would be happy to be the lead in a syndicate or to participate as a syndicate member, but only upon reaching the data we agreed to initially.
“From experience and talking to colleagues in the VC space, I doubt we will see a lot of companies that have raised series C [rounds] that are still in phase 1,” he added. “I think a lot of the time those companies are going to be gone. So because we are looking at late preclinical and early clinical, I think we will be looking at a certain kind of investor involvement, but having investors already in the equation is not a problem for us.”
Ultimately, Pierre Fabre Fund for Innovation will not necessarily be disruptive, Audoly said, but it was formed with a desire to be complementary to funding options already available to early-stage biotech companies that want to move from the discovery to the development phase.
“I am not suggesting this is unique – that is not my focus to tell the truth – but I do think we are helping by bringing another solution to what C-level teams and investors are facing today in some parts of the world,” he stated. “Obviously this product may not be made for everybody, and it might be that some companies do not feel it is good for them, but others may like it.
“The feedback we have got so far has been very encouraging, very good. We have got a lot of hits on our website and a lot of unsolicited emails from very relevant companies that we had not really heard of or been exposed to in the past, but because they heard of this new service they spontaneously reached out to the team.”
– Photo of Laurent Audoly courtesy of LinkedIn