A long fight
It took six years of attrition to verify the sublingual strip worked and convince the medical establishment of the need to be filled. Three more went on gathering late stage clinical trial data, securing analyst coverage and overseeing a transition to the main board of the Toronto stock exchange, and then an uplisting to the NASDAQ through a tier one syndicate led by Bank of America.
Then came the issue of what to do once apomorphine had proved its worth. “We’d always had a dual track approach: trade sale or developing a commercial arm for the company,” said Giovinazzo. Both had merits. “We were ready to go ahead and raise additional capital, in tranches of C$200-300 million a time, to commercialise the product.”
On the other hand, big pharma companies were hungry to pay top dollar for proven drugs in late stage development to supplement their own research and fill their pipelines. “I’d always assumed that, in the final years, I’d be reaching out to potential acquirers. It was very time consuming and many team members were frustrated about the extra effort involved.”
In the end, Cynapsus opted for a trade sale. “It is very difficult to build a fully integrated pharmaceuticals company, he said. “You need a sales force, regulatory expertise, and there’s huge execution risk.”
“Your salespeople want to have more than one product in their bags when visiting doctors. But it’s very hard to find more; you’re really head on with big pharma. I had extensive conversations with all my contacts and they stressed how hard it was. It’s difficult being just a one product company.”
Hence the decision to sell. “Mitigating risk was a key part of my strategy.”
Apomorphine, now branded as Kynmobi, is on sale in the US, though approval in Europe and Japan has yet to come. Uptake has been relatively slow, partly because of the continuing need to educate doctors and caregivers about the benefits – all suggesting the decision to retreat was the right call at the right time.
Anthony Giovinazzo’s 8 top leadership tips for aspiring entrepreneurs:
- Confidence and conviction in self and plan
- Unwavering perseverance over a long stretch of time
- Vision (see things in the distance long before most others)
- Build an executive team sharing objectives and comprising much smarter people than you
- Lead by example
- Accept dilution as the cost for having capital to drive milestones and valuation
- Teach everyone in your organization to: “Do the right thing next and the next thing right.”
- Extreme multitasking, juggling dozens of disparate critical activities simultaneously
And Giovinazzo’s five entrepreneurial business tips:
- Use outsourcing to build flexibility and agility in the execution of critical components of the business (Cynapsus outsourced manufacturing development).
- Strategic cross licensing to maintain momentum and avoid costs and time of litigation (like the multinational semiconductor and automobile industries).
- In building your pricing strategy, think about long term market share volumes versus short term profitability.
- Have a clear, succinct, coherent plan that is articulated in a story and tell that story hundreds of times a year.
- Build a network of knowledge based leaders globally and build a consensus among them for your product offering and its attributes.