Vision and Strategy
The Company’s primary goal is to build a profitable and sustainable business around its core competencies in compound discovery and development, and from the commercialisation (by Evolva or its partners) of its product candidates. To achieve this goal the Company intends to employ the following key strategies:
1. Build a balanced portfolio and offset risk
By building a balanced product portfolio, the Company aims to defray risk by increasing the probability of clinical and commercial success and reducing its exposure to the impact of any one product failure. In order to implement this strategy, the Company carries out its own product development programmes, but also plans to partner with third parties in order to defray the cost and risk of clinical development (particularly the cost of late stage clinical trials) and expand marketing power. Although such partnerships may enable the Company to commercialise any approved products without developing its own sales force, the Company may also decide to market approved products on its own in selected indications compatible with its overall resources (e.g., orphan indications, products sold to specialists).
2. Focus on differentiated product candidates that target significant unmet medical needs
We intend to focus on differentiated product candidates that target significant unmet medical needs because they have the potential to provide greater options and choices for the patient or consumer and better pricing potential for the supplier. The Company has chosen to emphasise cardio-renal and infectious disease indications because:
- together they cause 43% of all deaths in OECD countries, and 51% of all deaths worldwide, and, consequently, are both large markets in which important unmet medical needs remain;
- compounds created by our technology have similar structural characteristics to natural products, which have an especially strong track record in these sectors;
- they are especially important segments in emerging pharmaceutical markets such as India and China, and hence are likely to have favourable growth dynamics in the future; and
- the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies are all active in one of these two sectors, providing multiple opportunities to partner.
The Company emphasises small molecule compounds that can be delivered orally. Oral administration is often the most convenient administration route for patients and the most cost-effective for society. In most cases small molecules are also cheaper to manufacture than biologics.
3. Maintain and grow our technology platform
Our proprietary discovery technology platform uses a “disruptive” technological approach to the creation of novel small compounds that differs sharply from the prevailing approaches in the pharmaceutical industry today (i.e., synthetic chemistry and/or protein engineering). As a result, we expect to create compounds with different properties from those discovered by the majority of pharmaceutical companies. We plan to leverage our discovery technology not only to expand its own pipeline, but also to attract third party partners interested in using our technology in their own areas of interest.
4. Maintain and expand discovery and development partnerships
The Company already generates revenues from discovery partnerships with various third parties and plans to maintain and expand its partnerships in both discovery (based primarily on our technology platform) and development (based primarily on our compounds) in the future. The Company sees these partnerships as an important element of its strategy for three main reasons:
- they help build a balanced portfolio;
- they provide additional resources and talent; and
- they could provide us with better understanding of the needs of current and future customers (whether corporations, payors, doctors or patients).
In addition to partnerships in the pharmaceutical sector, we see opportunities to partner in sectors such as bio-defence, pharmaceutical intermediates, industrial chemicals and similar sectors.