Sandoz Boss Warns There’s a Climate Cost of Obesity Wonder Drugs

(Bloomberg) -- Richard Saynor wants to transform Sandoz Group AG into a world champion in copying leading-edge drugs, including anti-obesity and biological treatments, with the goal of bringing them to the masses.

After leading Europe’s largest generics company through a spinoff from Novartis AG last year, the chief executive officer has nearly doubled Sandoz’s share price. The 57-year-old Brit rejoined Basel-based Sandoz in 2019 after leaving for GSK nearly a decade earlier.

Saynor spoke with Bloomberg about why he enjoys tangling with big pharma companies, the merits of being boring, the environmental downside of obesity medications and why many governments will be disappointed in their quest to onshore medicine production. The transcript has been edited for brevity.

Bloomberg: Generic medicine has traditionally been a dull business. How are you going to keep investors interested?

Saynor: There’s $400 billion of product coming off patent in the next 10 years. It is more than has come off patent in the history of the industry.

So there’s no shortage of opportunities, but it’s expensive and it takes scale for development, manufacturing, legal and then commercial, and not many companies have that scale.

We’ve tried not to be exciting in many ways. I want to be boring. I just want to do what we said we would do and let the business speak for itself. I think that’s been rewarded over the last year.

Q: Diabetes and weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have been the hot thing in pharma. What does that mean for Sandoz?

A: In my 35 years in the industry, I’ve never known a class of drugs coming off patent where the originator can’t meet the demand. 

Data suggests besides diabetes, it has an effect clearly on weight loss, but also addiction, alcohol, gambling. It seems to have cardiovascular protection and might help with cancer. The opportunity to treat millions and millions of patients once costs come down — that in itself then raises a question around the capacity to manufacture sufficient product. 

The conversation that we’re not really having yet is ESG, because you’d be throwing away hundreds of millions of glass, plastic and metal vials. We’re talking about billions of doses of these products in a form that’s not particularly sustainable. Clearly it will be desirable from an ESG point of view and a patient’s acceptance point of view if different forms could be developed.

Q: Drug developers are increasingly making more complex and individualized therapies. What does that mean for generics?

A: It’s almost a new age in terms of some of the drug therapies that you’re seeing. At the end of the day, it is more time, more money. There are fewer competitors because it’s a harder thing to do. The science is there if you choose to invest. 

The question I ask when we start our development — sometimes before it’s even been launched by the originator — is if I make this drug more affordable, how many more patients could I treat and could I expand the market? If we could bring the medicine down from a million dollars a patient to a hundred thousand dollars a patient, are there going to be 10 times more patients to recover that investment? 

Q: After Covid and amid rising geopolitical tensions, more countries want domestic drug production. How feasible is that?

A: We now are the only antibiotics manufacturer left in the western world. As much as governments would like to onshore, either it’s incredibly expensive or there isn’t enough value to make that investment. 

Building a new antibiotics facility in the US would probably cost $2-3 billion. No one’s going to do that because you’re not going to get any kind of return from it. It’s the same with a lot of the biologic drugs. 

A lot of the generic drugs in the US market come from Asia, particularly India, these are very complicated supply chains. I think certainly in the short to midterm, it’s next to impossible.

Q: How do you look at Donald Trump’s incoming administration, given that he’s nominated a vaccine sceptic as health secretary?

A: I’m actually quite optimistic that with the new administration, potentially more change will happen for our industry, and that is a good thing. Trump always had a position ultimately wanting two things: a sustainable supply of medicines at affordable price and transparent pricing to US patients. I’m completely aligned with that. 

In many ways the US health care system is one of the most fractured and complex. It needs disrupting. I think there’s a huge opportunity to drive access in the US and other markets. US patients pay a massive premium for a lot of their products. I personally believe they shouldn’t have to.

Q: What’s the biggest change from running Sandoz as a unit of a bigger group compared to being the boss of an independent company?

A: The main difference between managing the unit before the split and being CEO of the standalone is not so much the organization around you, it is more the stakeholders above you — whether that’s governments, patient advocacy groups, your board, shareholders, analysts, investors, journalists. The job of running the company or leading hasn’t changed.

One of the things I did when I came back was stop anything that wasn’t a generic or a biosimilar development. We’re in the business of bringing accessible medicines to as many patients as possible by copying originator product. 

Q: After so many years in the industry, what keeps you motivated? 

A: You’re always fighting big pharma, whether you’re in court or whatever. To me, that’s always been one of the things that I’ve loved about this industry. 

I think we’re genuinely doing a good thing, we are making medicines more affordable for patients. It’s also much faster in many ways. If you’re a big pharma company and your patent is coming off 20 years from now, it’s a very slow train crash.

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