Focusing on Patients: Q&A with Renee Gala

Renee Gala
Chief operating officer
Jazz Pharmaceuticals

Renee Gala has been chief operating officer at Jazz Pharmaceuticals since October 2023. During that time, she’s focused on growing the company’s product portfolio while also maintaining the culture that attracted her to Jazz in the first place.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What is unique about Jazz's approach to research and development.
Renee Gala: What's important to understand is that Jazz has historically been a company that's had much more of a commercial presence and has been more of a commercial company. The company has been around for more than 20 years, and even when I joined the company in 2020, there was much less of an R&D footprint or pipeline. Over the last several years, we have really expanded that R&D footprint. We now have end to end capabilities in research and a pipeline that we've been able to invest in to create further durability within our broader commercial business.

Usually, you'll see an R&D company transition into also becoming a commercial company, but we've been able to broaden our business.

Pharm Exec: How important is DE&I at Jazz?
Gala: One of the things about Jazz that I think is remarkable is that when Jazz was formed over 20 years ago, it was founded based on being focused on patients and putting patients first. This is not typically the way most biotech companies are formed, which is you start with a compound or a product. This was formed based on putting patients first and being a great place to work, and those two foundational elements of the company’s formation have stayed with us. We have stayed true to those two elements of our values. With respect to being a great place to work, we strongly believe that valuing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is foundational to being a great place to work.

We've continued to evolve as a company, and we've continued to become more of a remote first company. We refer to that as a remix. While we are remote first, we do take the opportunity to purposefully and with intention come together with our employees as a matrix organization and in different locations to ensure that we maintain that underlying trust and connection. If you look at our leadership team, it’s more than 50% female. We have a well-diversified board of directors, and that extends then down to multiple layers within the organization, in terms of what you see as the composition of our employees. That is based on having a commitment to diversity and the underlying high-performance behaviors that are built on a foundation of trust. That includes constructive challenge, transparency, and a speak up culture. We do believe that that is incredibly important to ultimately getting to better results as a company.

Pharm Exec: What are your thoughts on the current state of the pharmaceutical industry?
Gala: We're an industry that does face several challenges in terms of the importance of innovating for patients. We're also an industry that has many opportunities, such as the opportunities that we have to incorporate artificial intelligence into research, development, and how we operate on a daily basis. Anything that we can do to speed up the rate of innovation for patients to be able to ensure that we are as effective and efficient in delivering medicines to patients as possible. Those are things that we should be pursuing, and of course, doing that in a way that maintains a high bar for patient safety and compliance. The way that the industry responds to the changing external political environment and pricing pressures and continues to focus on putting innovation first and putting patients first is the way that we can continue to advance the important work that we have as a company in the pharmaceutical industry. This includes both delivering medicines to patients from a commercial perspective and also bringing new therapies forward in our R&D engine.

I reflect on Jazz as a company and reflect on the differentiating strengths that I believe that we've been able to develop through our focus on patients and employees. In my more than more than 20 years in this industry, I have been incredibly impressed with the culture that we've been able to develop, and how we've been able to focus on being a great place to work, and what that can really mean in terms of the levels of employee satisfaction, if you read research about employee happiness or employee satisfaction and how that can lead to better outcomes for companies. That's an area that I think has continued to be an area that we're excelling in, and one that will continue to focus on going forward.