Talk to us about Organon, why the company was founded and what your aims are.
Essentially, the company has three streams of business. It has what we call the established brands business, which is our foundation, we have our biosimilar franchise, which is our relationship with Samsung, where we have a number of biosimilars.
And then ultimately, where we have our focus going forward, is in becoming really a leader in women’s health. We started out this journey with two franchises and contraception and fertility and we have quickly added to that franchise in the first actually eight months of going live, we’ve done four significant deals already.
And we’ve got more on the way we string up, we produce some pretty sizable cash flows that we can commit to really expanding the portfolio of women’s health because that’s what our vision is better and healthier every day for every woman around the world globally.
So we’re a focus company on women’s health, although we have other businesses that ultimately help us to be diversified and help us to be able to weather any shocks as you can see, every day there are more shocks to the system.
Has the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted disparities in women’s healthcare versus male healthcare? If so, how?
Well, honestly, the pandemic has really done nothing except exacerbate an issue that was already needing of care and investment and innovation. When you’re talking about only 4 percent of the $100bn a year or so that the industry uses for R&D is really dedicated uniquely to women’s health issues, it kind of screams for the fact that there needs to be more investment.
What I can tell you is that there’s a lot of hard endpoints, the pandemic has created real issues for women. I’ll throw some statistics out that are quite sobering: 78 percent of women today say that they typically put their health needs aside in lieu of taking care of their family’s issues and health needs first.
There was a recent study that was done that actually showed that 44 percent of all women actually waited until their symptoms became more acute before seeking medical help. And if you actually drill down to the data by age distribution, 62 percent of those in their 20s and 30s said they did not seek medical attention until their symptoms became more acute and more urgent.
That is not really telling you that there is a need, that tells you there’s a greater need for being able to address and to bring to the fore these issues in regards to women’s health. They need to seek treatment, more as a prophylactic rather than waiting until something becomes acute and becomes urgent.
There needs to be more societal attention, to be able to raise the level of women’s health needs not to be second, third, fourth, sixth in the overall family setting, but rather, at least be in the top two or three. Once that happens, I think then you’ll start to see more of this kind of effort to be able to address some of these issues.
I’ll give you an example. Only 20 percent in the US of women with endometriosis are effectively diagnosed, and a smaller percentage of them are effectively treated. That tells you two things. One is the medical community is not equipped in order to be able to diagnose effectively endometriosis.
Second, women treat themselves either over the counter with pain medications or a number of other things that don’t work.
Third, it tells you that the diagnostics available are not adequate in terms of research. If untreated, and unmanaged, many of those patients with endometriosis will become infertile, not to forget the kind of pain that they feel just through their menses and through the things that they’re dealing with. That’s just one example. We can go down the list and many other examples that I can throw out to you that ultimately says that there’s greater awareness and greater need for investment and awareness of what to do in the space.
If we talk about the business of women’s healthcare, how important are start-ups in driving the growth of the industry in terms of increasing investment and moving capital towards solving these problems that have been unmet in the past?
I think generally speaking it’s very good because of a few reasons. First, it creates the narrative in society. It’s creating a lot of churn, a lot of noise around the fact that there are these thousands and thousands of startups, trying to resolve issues in women’s health and fertility to menopausal symptoms, that creates a lot of noise in the system.
What that noise does, is it creates more interest by VC-backed or a lot of venture capital firms around the world to say, “You know what, we may not be able to afford to go in and buy a Merck. But what we can do is invest in some of these smaller, scientifically led organisations.”
You really got to bring the narrative up to the fact that many of the VC backed firms, many investment bankers, don’t have an understanding of women’s health issues.
All of this work and this noise, whether it’s Organon, standing at the tip of the spear, and, and being a spokescompany for the movement, all of that is very helpful. It will take time, not all these companies will actually end up emerging and be successful, but just this energy alone will I think, create more resources that are going to be dedicated to women’s health.