Despite securing three FDA approvals and outperforming a major competitor, Bluebird Bio struggled financially due to a persistent cash shortage. This experience demonstrates that market perception and a strong balance sheet can be more critical for investor returns than even breakthrough science and successful product launches.
Despite experiences in biotech consulting and venture capital, CEO Andrew Obenshain cites his time as a primary care sales rep for Merck as his most formative job. This ground-level role provided an unparalleled understanding of the sales, marketing, and operational realities of the pharmaceutical industry, setting the foundation for his executive career.
Drawing from his experience where investors misunderstood a product's potential, Andrew Obenshain was attracted to Inventiva precisely because of a similar disconnect. He saw that negative sentiment was overshadowing excellent clinical data, creating an undervalued opportunity that a new leader could capitalize on by correcting the narrative.
Counterintuitively, Inventiva's lead drug was designed to be a 'better' PPAR agonist by binding less tightly and more equally across three isoforms. This medicinal chemistry insight aimed to capture the combined efficacy of hitting all three targets while moderating the significant side effects that arose from previous drugs that bound tightly to individual isoforms.
A particularly difficult leadership challenge is laying off the very people responsible for a company's major successes. At Bluebird Bio, after achieving three FDA approvals, the company had to part ways with the successful clinical and research staff—the 'heroes'—because the business had shifted to a new stage and could no longer afford them.
France has world-class scientific talent and basic research, often originating groundbreaking IP like that behind Bluebird Bio. However, the ecosystem struggles to translate these innovations into large commercial entities due to structural issues like corporate governance and less favorable employee equity incentives, causing many innovations to be commercialized abroad.