Would You Describe Yourself As An Entrepreneur?

From The September 2016 Issue
Will GSK's Deal With Novartis Pay Off For Its Vaccine Aspirations?

“That’s an interesting question,” replies Axel Hoos, M.D., Ph.D., and the subject of a recent feature article in Life Science Leader magazine. The SVP therapeutic area head for oncology R&D and head of immuno-oncology at GSK has been in biotech before, an experience he says he very much enjoyed. “It operates differently than Big Pharma.” But to do what he was hoping to do — create an entirely new paradigm that resulted in the field of immuno-oncology — he felt he needed an environment with enough resources that one hiccup wouldn’t throw everything off. “In theory, what we are attempting at GSK could probably have been done at a small biotech, but with a lot more risk and hassle,” he attests. The successful immuno-oncology drug, ipilimumab, developed at BMS, actually came from Medarex. “The only reason it came to fruition was because of BMS,” Hoos attests. “I’m absolutely certain that Medarex couldn’t have brought the product to market on its own.”

What Hoos likes about GSK’s Discovery Performance Unit (DPU) structure is that you can be entrepreneurial while not being subjected to the risks of the market. While many believe Big Pharma can’t be innovative, Hoos disputes that assertion. “Big pharma can be entrepreneurial and do a lot of innovative stuff in a model like we have at GSK. If you have 30 DPUs across all of R&D, which we do, you can focus on 30 different areas of science. Every DPU head forms his or her own unit, and how they are structured aren’t exact replicas of one another. You set it up in a way that it works for your vision.”