How Diverse Skills Can Drive Success in Biotech

What specific skills or experiences do you think are most valuable for team members tasked with launching a novel treatment in a competitive market?

What we've tried to do at Verona is bring teammates on and team members on that have a wide wealth of experience. For example, our head of sales, marketing, and training has run marketing departments. He's been a Chief Business Officer at a startup health economics company. These experiences allow us to think about the commercialization process very differently than maybe a larger company that has certain you know, siloed, or specific job requirements that allows us to take on responsibilities or projects that you might need one or two people for but because you have a team that has a broad wealth of experience, you're able to do things at the right time with the right scale.

One of the things that we've tried to do at Verona is grow the organization at the right pace. You know, one thing that you know, we always struggle with at biotechs is how quickly and how many people do you bring on if you bring on people that have a variety of experiences? Example, our VP of sales, marketing, and training, he's done sales, he's done marketing, he's done health economics. He's done other roles within organizations that help us do work that's necessary at maybe earlier stages where if you brought on a person, you that person would have a task but wouldn't have a full, quote unquote, workload. I think that's really critical as an organization grows is to look at the people you bring in and the skills that they've done.

I think one of the things that we've tried to do as well as across the organization, bringing people that this isn't their first biotech experience, you know, we have people that have all started in large companies, for example, myself, I started at Eli Lilly went to a next, a smaller company at Salle X. But the organization has all started with people that have started at big places, and then eventually moved into biotech. So, they've experienced what good things Big Pharma has, but they also understand how biotech has to run a business and ultimately get something accomplished, potentially with less resources, less manpower, and more work on the individual. So, I think that's a really important aspect of Verona and successful biotechs as well.

Can you provide some specific examples of how market research and data analysis can inform product positioning and launch strategies for ensifentrine?

This has been really important to us, we talked about facts or friends in the article. And we all have innate biases are beliefs that we think will be are right or wrong. But until you do the work, you really should, until you do the work, you really shouldn't make take any action on that. I think one of the big things from a learning that we have from a lot of work from our market access and trade team was on how we plan to distribute and seed venturing into the marketplace.

That team did a tremendous amount of market research a tremendous amount of work with the, the payers, the channel to understand what the appropriate way to distribute NC pension would be. And as we discussed in our you know, in our investor day, in October, we talked about limited DME, specialty DME accredited specialty distribution network. If you had asked this team, the first day they got here, well, how we would distribute and how we bring NC veteran to market, that wouldn't have been the answer. So, the work that they put in, challenging the current way the products are distributed within COPD, understanding the dynamics that exists within a nebulized product and COPD, and then trying to find the right way that provides an outcome that we ultimately want. And that outcome is that when a doctor potentially prescribed NC veteran, we want to make sure that the physician and the patient are able to get that product. And that's not easy.

There are a lot of dynamics that go into place. But we want to make that process as seamless as possible. So, I think that's one of the best examples of where our work really shaped how we're going to market. You know, I think there's other work that's really important to over the course of the last two to three years. You know, COPD has been a marketplace that has seen the same mechanisms for the last 10 to 15 years. It's either llamas, llamas, or I ICS products, inhaled corticosteroids. And our marketing team did a tremendous job through physician market research through patient market research to really identify some challenges that still exist in this market. A lot of people would say that COPD is large, it's barely satisfied. But what we saw in that market research was a disconnect between physicians and patients on the impact of COPD on their daily lives. And that's highly evident within the literature where 50% of patients are still having significant persistent symptoms. But sometimes our physicians weren't digging in and really having in depth conversations to be able to help the patient or understand what the dynamics are going on in that patient's life.

And so, the team did a very good job of mining those insights and then crafting a market shaping or a disease education campaign that launched last year to help reinforce the challenges that COPD patients have today. That campaign is the, you know, unspoken COPD campaign. And it really highlights the burden the day-to-day burden that COPD patients have the caregivers have and the need to really assess and understand how our patient feels on a day-to-day basis.