Latest / The BioHub - by Avetix / Episode 180 - Ben Zimmer - CEO of Priovant Therapeutics

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Episode 180 - Ben Zimmer - CEO of Priovant Therapeutics · The BioHub - by Avetix

• 0:06
  So welcome back to another episode of the Bio Hub and
• 0:09
  Avetics podcast. Today, I'm joined by Ben Zimmer,
• 0:12
  CEO of Priovant Therapeutics. Ben has been at the heart of
• 0:15
  company creation in biotech for much of his career.
• 0:18
  He was among the 1st 10 employees at Royvan, where he
• 0:21
  helped incubate and launch multiple companies before going
• 0:24
  on to create Priovant in 2021. Priovant is a clinical stage
• 0:28
  biotech focused on developing novel therapies for severe
• 0:31
  autoimmune diseases, an area of huge momentum and unmet need.
• 0:35
  In this conversation, we talk about the inspiration behind
• 0:38
  Priorvant, lessons from the early days at Royvant, the
• 0:43
  current autoimmune boom, Ben's leadership approach, and what's
• 0:46
  coming next for the company. Pleasure to have you, Ben.
• 0:49
  How are you? Hi, I'm great.
• 0:51
  Thank you so much for having me. So let's let's just start back
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  with the Roivant days, the the very early days of Roivant and
• 1:02
  what, what was the original inspiration behind that company
• 1:06
  and just tell me what you learn in terms of the growth in Roy
• 1:10
  Van. Yeah, I mean you know, so
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  Roivant was started back in the in the mid twenty 10s in in
• 1:18
  2014. I, I joined at the very
• 1:20
  beginning of 20/20/15 and, you know, really there were, were a
• 1:26
  lot of different, you know, kind of themes that really been
• 1:30
  brought together. But I think it was really a
• 1:33
  company that had a lot of very big ambitions around how to do
• 1:36
  biopharma differently and, and better in a lot of ways.
• 1:42
  You know, kind of the core of that was, you know, the, the
• 1:45
  approach to, to asset sourcing and pipeline development and
• 1:51
  really finding, you know, promising assets for whatever
• 1:54
  reason other pharma companies may not have been pursuing
• 1:58
  because they were, you know, non strategic or, or otherwise.
• 2:03
  You know, this is something that actually it has over the
• 2:06
  subsequent decade become a lot more common in terms of spinning
• 2:09
  assets out of of large pharma companies, for instance, large
• 2:13
  pharma companies spinning assets out in partnership with company
• 2:17
  creation organizations. But when Roivant started, it was
• 2:22
  really, you know, kind of at the forefront of of doing that.
• 2:26
  And then also really a lot of focus at Royvent on, on
• 2:31
  execution and, and clinical execution in in particular, and
• 2:35
  kind of how to really reduce the time and cost of drug
• 2:38
  development through both novel development strategies as well
• 2:44
  as execution. And I think, you know, I, I
• 2:47
  really learnt a lot being a part of that and contributing to
• 2:50
  that. And I think, you know, two
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  things that I really took with me to, to Priovant from those
• 2:55
  early days of appointment was, was one, the value of big
• 2:57
  ambitions that if, if you set out with a, a big goal, you
• 3:02
  shouldn't be afraid, you shouldn't be afraid of that.
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  I think some people this sort of a fear of failure impedes their
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  ambitions and then you're sort of guaranteed to fall short.
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  And then really the value of a kind of hunger and tenacity and
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  drive from a small group of people that through, you know,
• 3:21
  through real force of will actually a small group of people
• 3:24
  can achieve quite, quite a bit. And I really tried to take both
• 3:28
  of those two things with me to private that.
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  That leads us really well on to the next question, which was
• 3:38
  from Royvan. You then went on to create
• 3:40
  Priorvan. What?
• 3:41
  What was the original inspiration behind building
• 3:44
  Priorvan as its own company? Yeah.
• 3:48
  So, so Priovant was started as a partnership between Roivant and
• 3:52
  and Pfizer and it was built around our lead asset
• 3:56
  repositnab, which is oral one's daily tick 2 Jack 1 inhibitor
• 4:01
  and brevisinap had previously been developed by Pfizer for,
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  for a number of years through through phase two trials.
• 4:10
  And really we had a vision around private.
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  And by we, I, I collectively mean the Roivant team, the
• 4:17
  Pfizer team and you know, the early leadership of, of Priovant
• 4:22
  around taking the asset and building around it a company
• 4:26
  focused on exclusively rare autoimmune diseases.
• 4:30
  At the time drug development in autoimmune disease and it still
• 4:35
  is, but at the time even more so was focused mostly on the
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  largest market, most prevalent conditions like psoriasis,
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  rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis.
• 4:47
  And, and we really had a vision of of going in instead to these
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  rarer autoimmune diseases with very high morbidity, very high
• 4:56
  unmet need and little to nothing available for patients in terms
• 5:01
  of not only approved therapies, but at the time even therapies
• 5:05
  in late stage development. And, and so, so yeah, I think we
• 5:09
  had a great asset and and a great mission and, and set out
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  on that in in the second-half of 2021 when the company was
• 5:17
  created. Yeah, it's really cool.
• 5:20
  And then you guys have obviously an autoimmune, which has become
• 5:25
  one of the most active areas in biotech.
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  Why do you think we're seeing so much momentum now?
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  Yeah, I think there's, I think there's a lot of reasons.
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  I think, you know, it probably starts, if you think back like
• 5:39
  over the past 20 to 30 years, there's been a lot of innovation
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  in, you know, just kind of basic science research in autoimmune
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  disease in terms of better characterizing autoimmune
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  diseases better, you know, understanding them, you know,
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  understanding the path of biology and key drivers and
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  therefore potential, you know, targets to, to go after with,
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  with drug discovery and development.
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  And, and obviously it takes time for, for those innovations to
• 6:11
  flow through into clinical development.
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  But I think over the last, you know, 5 to 5 to 10 years, we've,
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  you know, we've really started to see that both with those, you
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  know, kind of larger, more prevalent conditions as I talked
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  about. But also, I think increasingly,
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  you know, you're starting to see companies like ourselves focused
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  on on rarer conditions as well. Yeah, Yeah.
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  Let's just talk about your focus because you you talked about the
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  rarer side of it, the most severe autoimmune indications.
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  What puts you at the forefront of this space versus others
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  coming in? Yeah.
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  I, I think there's a number of of different things.
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  I think I think I would kind of talk about two categories.
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  The first is the asset, which is the most important and then the
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  second is some distinctive features of the company itself.
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  Obviously in in biopharma at the end of the day, the most
• 7:13
  important thing by by far is, is the the medicine,
• 7:17
  investigational medicine that that you have.
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  And I think our drug, the mechanism is really particularly
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  well suited to these more severe autoimmune diseases.
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  You know, if you think about, you know, severe high morbidity
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  condition, often it is severe because there's multiple
• 7:36
  different inflammatory pathways involved.
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  So a classic single cytokine targeted antibody is not always
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  the right approach necessarily for for treating that condition.
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  A number of the diseases that we're pursuing like
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  dermatomyositis, non infectious uveitis, sarcoidosis, these are
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  conditions where you have a lot of different inflammatory
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  pathways involved innate an adaptive immunity.
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  You have T cell related pathways, B cell related
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  pathways. And we have in brepacitinib a
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  drug where through take 2 Jack one inhibition we're able to
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  suppress the signaling of a variety of different cytokines
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  linked to autoimmunities. So what we're able to suppress
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  type 1 interferon, type 2 interferon, aisle 6, aisle 12,
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  aisle 23, among among others. And I think this is really well
• 8:35
  suited to these more more severe conditions.
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  And we've seen that play out in the in the clinic so far.
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  You know, the the drug across a wide variety of of conditions in
• 8:47
  phase two and and now the first phase three study has has
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  demonstrated excellent, excellent clinical results.
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  And so I think that mechanistic story, it has really played out
• 9:00
  in the clinic in an exciting is. And then I would also just say
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  that the company itself, I think, you know, credit to, to
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  all of those who are behind the, the vision of it, which goes far
• 9:12
  beyond just myself. But you know, I think we were
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  really at the forefront of identifying these rare or
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  autoimmune diseases as as real unmet needs and real
• 9:23
  opportunities. And these are conditions that
• 9:26
  are, are rare, but they're not ultra rare.
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  They affect, you know, 10s of thousands of patients in the
• 9:32
  United States alone in many of these conditions.
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  And then if you start stacking up the conditions one after one
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  after the next, you start really looking at a giant, you know,
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  portion of the population that is very sick and and very under
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  treated because of the lack of good treatments for them for
• 9:53
  them to use are certainly they're they're under treated
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  with with with good therapies. Often they're heavily treated
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  with things like, you know, high dose steroids and and so so
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  yeah, I think there's we we were.
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  And again by we, I mean really collectively those behind
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  Priovant where I think at the forefront of identifying that as
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  an unmet need and a real opportunity.
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  I think others since have followed.
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  And then I also think really having a company that's focused
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  exclusively on that is, is, is distinctive and I think matters.
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  It makes a real difference. I think that doing, you know,
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  anything in rare disease, whether it's drug development or
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  launching a drug, it requires in, in certain ways an artisan's
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  touch and a very kind of hands on dedicated approach and
• 10:47
  investment from the company. And I think doing that in the
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  context of a company where the whole company is focused
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  exclusively on these rare conditions as opposed to that
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  being a kind of like division or branch of a larger organization,
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  I think can can really help differentiate the organization
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  and being able to work effectively there.
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  Yeah, I love that the way you answered that question was
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  interested in its own right as well, because you almost just
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  talk about the mission of the whole company and you know what
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  you're trying to achieve. And you know, the fact that you
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  got their foot is, is a, is a big part of it.
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  But really like the commitment to to go out and actually
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  execute. Is is is why you're doing so
• 11:31
  well. No, I, I, I think so.
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  And I think like, you know, it's a cliche to say, you know,
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  whatever inspiration is, you know, you know, mostly
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  perspiration. And, and that's certainly been
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  the case in, in my, in my experience, I think having, you
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  know, a great vision and idea and strategy.
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  And certainly in the case of, of, you know, drug development,
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  a great asset, you know, that's, that's necessary, that's table
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  sticks. But it, it's really not
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  sufficient, especially if you're working, if you're working in,
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  in rare disease. And it, it really, it really
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  requires a level of passion and commitment from, from the team
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  and, and from the people involved.
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  It's not something that for the faint of heart, for the faint of
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  heart to take on. Yeah, definitely.
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  And and and I mean you said earlier 20/21 was when you
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  founded. So what we're coming up to five
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  years sort of time frame. That's right, it'll be five
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  years this fall. Yeah, amazing.
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  And as as a CEO, how how would you describe your leadership
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  approach, especially when building teams in a fast moving,
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  high stakes therapeutic area? Yeah, no, it's, it's a great
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  question. And I, I don't know that there's
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  any sort of like 1, you know, one, one single thing.
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  But I think a few, a few things that I, I try to focus on, you
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  know, I think the first is that again, like I said, working in
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  rare diseases, it requires, it requires a lot of people to kind
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  of do a lot of work in an artisan's touch.
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  So one example of that is running clinical trials.
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  If you're running a hypertension study, for instance, you know,
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  most of your clinical trial sites are going to be these
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  clinical trial centers that are private practices whose, you
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  know, sole purpose is running studies like hypertension trials
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  for, for a rare disease, for a variety of reason, variety of
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  reasons that that doesn't really work.
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  And you, what you end up doing is going to these tertiary
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  centers of excellence that are mostly academic centers and, and
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  you need to partner with them to run the, run the trials.
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  And these are physicians and centers that are very committed,
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  very excited to participate and, and, and lead the trial,
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  assuming they're excited about the, the investigational
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  therapy. But, but these are people
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  obviously who also, you know, their, their full time job is
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  not running pharma sponsored therapeutic trials.
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  They have their own academic research.
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  They have, you know, teaching of, of, you know, residents and
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  fellows and medical students. And so, you know, they're
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  they're people who are who are, you know, they have their
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  clinical practices, obviously just their ordinary course
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  clinical practice, which takes up a lot of time.
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  So these are people who, however committed, they are pulled in a
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  lot of directions. And, you know, actually these
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  are external people outside the company, but I think a big part
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  of being effective in this space is actually inspiring and
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  motivating those people to, you know, do the work that at the
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  end of the day, they only they as the experts can, can really
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  do. I would say to our team
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  internally, we work full time on this.
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  We own this drug. How could we expect these people
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  in, you know, who don't work at our company to put time and
• 15:13
  effort into making it successful if we're not willing to put in,
• 15:17
  you know, 10 times that ourselves?
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  And, and I would say if I had to kind of reduce my leadership
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  philosophy to, to one thing, it, it's really, it's really that
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  and this notion that, you know, if you're going to be a leader
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  in rare disease, if you're going to make a real impact there, it,
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  it requires, you know, real commitment from the people
• 15:41
  working at the pharma company and a real prioritization of the
• 15:45
  mission of the company and the work and working for something
• 15:49
  bigger than yourselves. And even, you know, the time,
• 15:53
  self sacrifice that's needed in terms of that, like working late
• 15:56
  or working on weekends or whatever it is that is needed
• 16:00
  to, you know, to get the job done.
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  I love that. And you lead by example on on
• 16:05
  those kind of policies as well, which?
• 16:07
  I'd certainly like to think so. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:11
  We'll need to to vouch, but that's, that's certainly, that's
• 16:15
  certainly my mindset and approach.
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  And again, comes back to having really cut my teeth, not as a,
• 16:24
  you know, senior executive of giant organizations, but as more
• 16:28
  of a startup person. And you know, when you're at
• 16:31
  like a 10/20 person, you know, company, there's no room.
• 16:35
  There's no room to hide. Whether you're, you know, an
• 16:38
  entry level team member or the CEO, everyone needs to be, you
• 16:43
  know, not, not just sitting around reviewing other people's
• 16:46
  work, but doing work themselves. And I've even as prior event, I
• 16:51
  mean, we're still a pretty small company.
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  We're around 100 people now. We'll probably be doubling
• 16:56
  roughly in size over the next 6 to 12 months.
• 17:00
  But but yeah, you know that that's still a relatively small
• 17:05
  company by the standards of, of corporate America.
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  And so, you know, I think the same principle absolutely still
• 17:14
  applies. And I, I try to embody that
• 17:16
  myself and, and you know, get other members of our leadership
• 17:20
  team too as well. You've got to, you've got to
• 17:22
  leave from the front and you can't over delegate.
• 17:26
  Yeah, I, I, I love that mindset. I'd try and do that.
• 17:30
  I mean, we're much more smaller scale than you myself, but like
• 17:34
  that sort of first in, last out mentality.
• 17:37
  I think some leaders go the opposite way, don't they?
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  When they get more responsibility they must take
• 17:44
  less on, like you said, almost over delegate, which I think is
• 17:47
  interesting. Yeah, yeah, I, I'm empathetic to
• 17:51
  that too, because it's like, OK, say you have 500 people who work
• 17:56
  for you. You can easily say, well, is my
• 18:00
  time better spent doing? Sort of on the front lines doing
• 18:05
  work myself or if I can get those 500 people to each be 10%
• 18:11
  more productive, then that's a far, you know, that that's a far
• 18:16
  better return on my time than sort of contributing as an
• 18:19
  individual contributor. But I, I think part of what that
• 18:22
  misses is how do you get people to be productive in, in my
• 18:28
  experience and my belief at least one, again, one of the
• 18:31
  ways is, is leading by example. And you know, you, you
• 18:37
  especially if part of the way you're trying to get people to
• 18:40
  be productive is really give extra effort and extra energy to
• 18:44
  what they're, to what they're doing.
• 18:46
  You can't really expect that of people if you're not willing to
• 18:49
  do it yourself. And just as we can't expect
• 18:52
  external partners to do that if we're not as a company like to
• 18:55
  do that. I think as a leader, you can't
• 18:57
  expect the people who work for you to kind of really have a
• 19:02
  sort of no task is too small for me mindset if you don't have
• 19:07
  that mindset yourself. 100% and and you've worked across
• 19:12
  operations, policy, company incubation and more.
• 19:17
  How does that breadth and shape the way you make decisions?
• 19:22
  Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's
• 19:24
  interesting because I don't have a technical scientific
• 19:28
  background. I think reasonably good
• 19:32
  scientific acumen, but, but you know, that's different than than
• 19:37
  many, many leaders in biopharma. And I think one of one of the
• 19:43
  things that's notable, especially as you move into kind
• 19:45
  of the later stages of biopharma clinic, like what I'm going to
• 19:48
  say is maybe less true of drug discovery or even translational
• 19:52
  research. But once you move into phase
• 19:54
  two, phase three clinical development and then certainly,
• 19:58
  you know, regulatory approvals and commercialization, it's a
• 20:02
  very interdisciplinary exercise. So there's.
• 20:06
  There's a lot of technical expertise that's required, but
• 20:10
  it's technical expertise over a lot of different areas.
• 20:14
  You know, there's sort of medical therapeutic expertise.
• 20:17
  That therapeutic expertise itself is often, you know, we're
• 20:20
  pursuing programs in, you know, rheumatology, ophthalmology,
• 20:25
  dermatology, you know, each of those obviously has its own, you
• 20:30
  know, distinct medical expertise.
• 20:31
  Then you have, you know, the chemistry expertise needed
• 20:35
  around manufacturing. You still have a lot of like
• 20:38
  basic science and pharmacology involved as well.
• 20:42
  You don't have to mention Biostatistics, regulatory
• 20:45
  expertise, legal expertise. You know, capital markets become
• 20:49
  more complicated as you move into later stage research.
• 20:54
  And so no, no one has, no one has expertise in all of this
• 20:59
  stuff. No, no one is a technical expert
• 21:01
  in everything I just said, or you would have had to be in
• 21:04
  Graduate School for 150 years. And so I, I think part of my
• 21:10
  approach has been, you know, to obviously hire leaders within
• 21:16
  each of those areas who bring a lot of expertise to bear and,
• 21:20
  and who can, you know, who I can trust and we can trust as an
• 21:23
  organization. But but then also not just sort
• 21:26
  of like blot to the spirit of the conversation we're having
• 21:29
  before, not just sort of like blindly delegate to them and be
• 21:31
  like, OK, you're the expert, you know, you do your job and just
• 21:35
  tell me what to do. But really ask a lot of
• 21:37
  questions, kick the tires on things and really try to think
• 21:42
  about like, OK, what are the connections and synthesis that
• 21:45
  needs to be done across multiple of those different areas to kind
• 21:49
  of bring, bring that together for effective decision making
• 21:54
  for the company? Because I think often a lot of
• 21:56
  the sort of big picture decisions that we need to make
• 21:59
  at the sort of senior executive level of the company require
• 22:04
  sort of interplay between multiple of these different
• 22:07
  technical disciplines. And, and I think, you know, one
• 22:10
  of the things that I've, I've tried to do and kind of use my
• 22:14
  maybe more, for lack of a better term, liberal arts background to
• 22:17
  bear in it is kind of, you know, drawing the connections and
• 22:21
  synthesis across these different areas.
• 22:25
  Obviously that requires some degree of like scientific rigour
• 22:28
  because you have to be able to understand what people are, are
• 22:31
  talking about. And I, and I think, you know,
• 22:34
  thankfully I'm, I'm able to, to bring that level to there.
• 22:38
  Yeah, for sure. But you're and we were talking
• 22:41
  about this a little bit before we click record, but so a lot of
• 22:45
  the exciting things happening with with Priovant at the moment
• 22:47
  and you know, it's some pretty big milestones as well, right?
• 22:53
  Yeah, no, I mean it's been it's been well, it's been an
• 22:57
  exciting, you know, 4 1/2 five years.
• 23:00
  But really I think that that you know, many years of hard work
• 23:05
  has started knock on wood to really pay off in the last, you
• 23:09
  know, in the last year give or take.
• 23:13
  Our, our weed program is in a disease I think I mentioned
• 23:17
  before dermatomyositis, which is a very severe condition,
• 23:22
  systemic inflammatory condition affects primarily the skin and
• 23:26
  muscles that can impact other organs as well.
• 23:31
  And this is an area with no, no approved modern therapies.
• 23:36
  And last year we generated a positive phase 3 result there
• 23:41
  that was really exciting first ever phase three for a targeted
• 23:45
  therapy in the disease. First ever positive
• 23:49
  placebo-controlled trial of any kind for an oral once daily
• 23:52
  therapy in the 1st 52 week placebo-controlled trial to read
• 23:58
  out positively. So really a kind of exciting
• 24:01
  Seminole moment for the field. On the basis of that data, we
• 24:06
  filed our new drug application with FDA and and actually just
• 24:09
  recently learned that it was accepted for priority review.
• 24:15
  Accepted does not mean approved to those who are not not well
• 24:20
  versed in the technical languages, the technical
• 24:24
  language of of these regulatory engagements.
• 24:27
  So the, you know, the final approval decision is is expected
• 24:32
  in the third quarter of of this year, but certainly exciting
• 24:36
  progress and we're excited to work closely with the FDA over
• 24:39
  the next few months to to support them in their review and
• 24:42
  hopefully have an approved therapy in, in just a few
• 24:47
  months. And then on the back of that,
• 24:49
  obviously we're we're really excited to, to launch the drug,
• 24:53
  make it available to patients and, you know, support as many
• 24:57
  appropriate patients as possible who can benefit from the, from
• 25:02
  the medicine being able to, to receive it and have access to
• 25:06
  it. Yeah, it's amazing, honestly.
• 25:09
  Like Congrats in in what you're doing.
• 25:11
  It's so well deserved a lot. Thanks.
• 25:15
  I appreciate it. And it's a huge, a huge number
• 25:19
  of people at Pride and and beyond to have contributed to
• 25:22
  it. So I I can't take anything due
• 25:25
  to credit it's. Really cool.
• 25:26
  And that that brings us to our final question, Ben, which is
• 25:30
  the same question I ask every one of our guests, which is if
• 25:35
  you could have dinner with any scientist or innovator, past or
• 25:38
  present, who, who would it be and why?
• 25:42
  Yeah, no, I mean, this is, this is a tough one.
• 25:45
  And I I, you know, you, you told me in advance that this is
• 25:49
  coming. So I had a chance to think a
• 25:51
  little bit about it. I think that, you know, the
• 25:55
  answer, the best answer I could think of was a Galileo, which is
• 26:00
  from a long time ago. But one of the things I
• 26:02
  appreciate about him was he was a real contrarian thinker.
• 26:07
  You know, was was kind of willing to go against what it
• 26:11
  the time was the sort of predominant, you know,
• 26:14
  scientific establishment and, you know, have have a bunch of
• 26:21
  theories that were viewed as, you know, piracy by the sort of
• 26:26
  both political and intellectual leaders of his day.
• 26:30
  He was, you know, placed under house arrest for many years as a
• 26:34
  result of his unwillingness to to, you know, recant his views.
• 26:40
  But yet today, obviously, we look back and view him as having
• 26:44
  been correct. And so I really appreciate that.
• 26:48
  I think to me that's what, you know, science and innovation is
• 26:52
  really about is being able to, you know, kind of think against
• 26:55
  the grain and not just kind of pirate group think, but yeah,
• 27:00
  think differently and have the courage of your convictions and,
• 27:05
  you know, stand behind them. And that's how thinking and
• 27:08
  innovation is, is advanced. You know, I have no idea what he
• 27:13
  would actually be like in person.
• 27:15
  You know, the, the, the, the saying don't never meet your
• 27:18
  heroes or whatever. I I have found to be very true
• 27:22
  in my own lived experience that the end of the day, human beings
• 27:26
  are are human. That's part of it as well,
• 27:28
  though. But I think Galileo would
• 27:32
  certainly be a cool, cool and interesting person to me.
• 27:35
  For sure. Yeah, I'd, I mean, I love that
• 27:38
  answer. It's a really good answer.
• 27:39
  And look, thank you so much for coming on, Ben.
• 27:41
  It's been an absolute pleasure. No, thank you.
• 27:44
  Really appreciate it and talk to you again soon.
• 27:48
  For sure. And look, everyone please like
• 27:50
  and subscribe to the Bio Hub and and thank you so much again,
• 27:53
  Ben. Thanks so much.