HS&M - March/April 2016

He shaped the product identification, selection and prioritization as well as portfolio management processes for Teva North America, and later Teva Global Generic R&D. He also oversaw commercial pre-launch clearance and risk assessment, and provided litigation preparation support, for an R&D pipeline of over 1,000 products. As breathtaking as that sounds, Evi makes it more adventurous when he describes the vast intelligence-gathering and split-second timing it took to guarantee that Teva captured the First-To-File opportunities afforded to generic filers with the FDA, sometimes edging out the competition by hours or even minutes.

“Of course, we had people in Israel who had already been at work for seven hours by the time we got up, so that was an advantage!” he notes.

But it was time once again to expand his horizons, so in 2010 Evi followed a colleague to Catalent Pharma Solutions, a private-equity owned global organization specializing in prescription, biologics and consumer health. Not that it limited him, but his title was VP of Global Innovation & Portfolio Management. The vision was to transform Catalent from a contract manufacturing organization to a sophisticated product development partner across the three key sectors.

“It was about identifying oppor-
tunities for new dosage forms,
delivering molecules, finding new
combinations, and repurposing
old molecules. Then taking those
opportunities to customers who
could bring them to market,” he
says. Harking back to his executive
chef period, he modestly portrays
it as “taking half-baked ideas and
making them fully baked.”
At Catalent, he engineered global
workflows for product identifica-
tion, selection and new product in-
troduction for the prescription and
consumer health divisions, deliver-
ing a $273M funnel of products,
which eventually became $627M
worth of opportunities for their
strategic customers and partners.
Not to rest on those laurels, he also
collaborated on creating a global
R&D function that delivered in-
novation and technology develop-
ment growth ultimately worth $1B.
With a “B.”
It became obvious that Evi’s most
vital talent was a combination of
seeing where the future was and
putting together the teams and
structure to get there first.

“What I enjoy is getting people working across disciplines – putting scientists, manufacturing, IT and others in the same room and empowering them to do what they do best, but in collaboration.

It’s that synergy that makes our work exciting. It’s what Edison called the Innovation factory.”

Evi describes it further as a two-step process. “Inventing is the beginning, but inventing only gets you part of the way there. Innovation – the act of bringing the invention into the real world – is the discipline that finishes the task.” One particularly meaningful project was expanding the delivery capability of ibuprofen. “It had been around since 1969 in the UK, and 1974 in the U.S. But it took a team of people to recognize that more could be done with it. Pfizer was interested in developing a softgel capsule formulation. The contents of a softgel capsule are ideally a clear liquid, which give this dosage form its pristine look. Dissolving ibuprofen in a liquid proved challenging, and the scientists at Catalent identified that a different salt form of the molecule could do the trick. Serendipitously, this new dosage form also proved to have a rapid release effect, providing an added advantage for a medication that is supposed to treat aches and pains. Acting faster was a distinct benefit.

Despite the success of his tenure as a member of the senior leadership team at Catalent, Evi seems almost sheepish in reporting that the original goal was to take the company to IPO position in two years, but that it eventually took four years of strong team work, under the laser-focused leadership of current CEO John Chiminsky, to get there. Considering its pre-IPO position of $1.8B and $464 EBIDTA, it seems there’s not much to be embarrassed about.