“The greatest opportunity at Teva is our innovative pipeline. We’re really leaning in on our innovative pipeline as an integral part of our pivot to growth strategy.”
This is the ambitious vision of Dr Eric Hughes, Executive Vice President of Global R&D and Chief Medical Officer at Teva Pharmaceuticals, speaking on the latest PharmaSource podcast about the company’s strategic transformation from generics powerhouse to innovative biopharmaceutical leader.
Eric brings over 21 years of pharmaceutical expertise across multiple global companies, from large corporations to emerging biotechs. His passion for organisational effectiveness and modern drug development has positioned him to lead Teva’s ambitious transformation under new CEO Richard Francis.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Eric explains how strategic partnerships and a matrix organisational approach are driving Teva’s remarkable 10 consecutive quarters of growth. He shares best practices on leveraging generics expertise for innovation, building successful partnerships across multiple therapeutic areas, and creating synergies between different business portfolios.
Strategic Alliances: Expanding Bandwidth Through Global Partnerships
Eric’s approach to partnerships goes beyond traditional outsourcing. These strategic alliances address multiple business objectives while removing funding constraints. “The ultimate goal to increase our bandwidth, accelerate our platforms and our pipeline – and really funding that.”
Teva and Sanofi are collaborating to co-develop and co-commercialize duvakitug for the treatment of ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. Each company will equally share the development costs globally, and the net profits and losses in major markets, with other markets subject to a royalty arrangement. Sanofi will lead the phase 3 clinical development program whilst Teva will lead commercialization in Europe, Israel and specified other countries.
The Sanofi partnership exemplifies Eric’s strategy: “It was a perfect partnership for both of us to expand our bandwidth and really blow open a very big programme that will go into multiple indications in the future. We are sharing both the costs and the profits, but we’re also extending our bandwidth.”
Teva and Fosun Pharma partner on early-stage oncology drug TEV-56278, currently in phase 1 clinical development for various forms of cancer. Teva’s experimental anti-PD1-IL2 ATTENUKINE therapy is designed to selectively deliver interleukin-2 to PD-1-expressing T cells within the tumour microenvironment, with the goal of amplifying anti-tumour T-cell activity whilst minimising systemic toxicities.
“We’re bringing an innovative product to China to actually capitalise on the burgeoning infrastructure of drug development in China, as well as the opportunity for patients there,” Eric explains. Despite geopolitical challenges, he remains optimistic: “You have to know the rules. You have to know where and how to set up a deal to optimise it both for the China company and the global company. There are ways of doing this.”
Teva’s Matrix Model: Leveraging Synergies Across Three Portfolios
Eric implemented a matrix system that breaks down traditional silos between generics, biosimilars, and innovative drugs. This structure “capitalises on all the synergies of those different business units.”
The integration recognises that “there’s a lot more similarities between a generic and an innovative programme than most people recognise.” This allows Teva to leverage cross-portfolio strengths: “Our generics has fantastic formulation capabilities, it has fantastic device capabilities. Those can be helpful to our innovative efforts.”
The matrix approach extends beyond internal operations. “We really lean into the real partnership approach in a way that we can capitalise on structure and infrastructure around the world, but be a real accelerator of our internal work.”
Eric emphasises maintaining control over critical elements: “What you want to keep in-house is usually that initiation of the studies, your site engagement and your data management. So you have to focus on what you need to control in-house, but you have to then know that you’ll partner across the globe to run these studies.”
The Partnership Principle: Building Collaborative Service Provider Relationships
Eric’s philosophy centres on treating service providers as true partners rather than vendors. “You have to treat a CRO as someone who is in a mission together where they understand that they both want to succeed. And that has to go both ways.”
This collaborative approach requires honest feedback from both sides. “They have to give us feedback. If I’m getting something wrong, I want to know it. And the CRO has to know that they’re comfortable enough to tell me that’s not going to work. I’ve got a better idea.”
The ultimate goal is seamless integration: “The best situation is when you forget the lines between the CRO and your own internal people. If you forget who works for what company, that’s the perfect situation.”
Eric’s selection criteria focus on compatibility and honesty: “You do want to pick your CROs carefully. The best situation is where their size matches your size. They’re willing to tell you that they can’t do something. I love it when a CRO says that they can’t do something, because they don’t want to over promise.”
His primary expectation remains execution: “Don’t over promise and deliver on what you say and hit the timelines. That’s the most important thing.”
Industry Evolution: CRO Adaptation and Future Challenges
Eric acknowledges the rapid evolution required from service providers in today’s complex landscape. “When you think about the complexity of what they have to do, both CROs and CDMOs, they have to invest a lot of money into the AI technology, the new ways of doing things, the processes and the infrastructure that they have to build.”
He argues this specialisation benefits pharmaceutical companies: “I would much rather have them invest in it and get the benefits of the scale that they can get as being the expert than having me spend my money maintaining those systems.”
Looking ahead, Eric sees emerging trends reshaping the industry. “The world of Bispecifics… there’s a lot of activity in bispecifics in the oncology world, but there’s also a lot of activity in the inflammatory space. The degrader space… that’s a very potent way of attacking targets, whether it’s a small molecule degrader or an antibody directed degrader.”
Looking Forward: Teva’s Five-Year Vision
Eric’s ambitious vision reflects the company’s transformation journey: “We want to make this someday a Harvard Business Review about how we took a company that was doing great and served almost 200 million people every day. And we transformed it into a leading biopharmaceutical company that is a highly innovative, internationally well-known company.”
With three large Phase three programmes “with a high probability of success” Eric is confident about the trajectory: “It’s not a matter of whether we’re going to succeed, it’s going to be how much are we going to succeed.”
The transformation hinges on maintaining Teva’s heritage strengths whilst embracing innovation.
“Teva has a history and a strength in neurosciences. That was a given. We had great expertise and we had a platform both in the R&D organisation, the commercial organisation to lean into. We also have laboratories that do a great job of making antibodies and engineering proteins, and that lends itself very easily to the immunology space.”
