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.
“At that point, what was I to do?”
Evi asks, as though someone with
that resume would be at a loss for