Since stepping down from his most recent leadership gig in biotech, Dr. Jeremy Levin has found his new calling as an industry advocate of sorts. His new book, “Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust,” is slated for publication on May 19 and lays out a roadmap for how industry leaders can elevate the sector to safeguard innovation in the U.S.
Levin’s perspective comes from decades of seeing pharma and biotech from multiple angles.
As a business development head at Bristol Myers Squibb from 2007 to 2012, Levin devised a transformative “string of pearls” dealmaking strategy that helped the company build a more diversified and innovation-focused pipeline.
After leaving BMS, he grabbed the CEO reins at Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world’s largest generic drugmaker. But after steering it through a tumultuous year, Levin stepped away from Big Pharma leadership entirely.
A few years later, Levin got his groove back in the biotech world as CEO of Ovid Therapeutics. A clinical-stage neuroscience company that’s tackling challenging CNS disorders with first-in-class drugs, Ovid embodies the innovative mindset of biotech. And biotech’s value as a birthplace for transformative medicines is something Levin wants more Americans to know about.
“It’s time that biotech companies grew up and created an identity … and that the person on the street knows they are an innovation engine for America,” Levin said.
If biotech leaders can open more eyes to the impact of their work, the public will get behind policies that support the industry’s R&D. Levin also believes biotech should distance itself from the controversies and challenges plaguing the rest of pharma.
“The biggest change I’d like is to embed the concept that we need to re-bond with the patient,” he said. “If we’re able to do that and secure their support then a lot of the legislative wrecking balls that get thrown at pharma will not be coming for biotech.”
Levin transitioned from CEO at Ovid to chair this year and continues to serve as a board member for the lobbying group Bio, which positions him well to spread his rallying cry.
Here, Levin explains why the time was right to make a bold declaration to lawmakers and biotech.
This interview has been edited for brevity and style.
PHARMAVOICE: Why did you decide to write this book?
DR. JEREMY LEVIN: One very fundamental reason was that extraordinary science — the best it’s ever been in the industry — is facing an astonishing and acute disruption to the system that underpins it. That started a long time ago … but an acceleration occurred this year. The FDA was disrupted, core questions about scientific fact were called into question, NIH funding was cut, immigration was disrupted — and all of this occurred while public health capabilities were being eroded.
The extraordinary impacts of the rise of China makes fixing this now an imperative, unless we want to lose the leadership we’ve accrued and end up not with a premier situation but a diminished situation. The bottom line is that innovation will not stop, but capital will begin to flow to where innovation is. And the very extraordinary things that were developed in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and elsewhere that were dependent on high-risk capital will migrate away. So I felt it was time to say something.
"Biotech is also a long-term industry, but people treat it like it’s something to trade every day."
In your book, you speak to a broad range of stakeholders in the industry — from biotech executives to lawmakers. Which audience were you targeting the most?
The first and most overwhelmingly important group is legislators and policymakers. My message for them is straightforward. All this work and innovation has given the biotech industry these capabilities, but we don’t recognize it as an industry. If we were to say that biotech is a strategic asset like we do with housing, defense or agriculture, it would become a different kind of entity. Some countries have made biotech a priority and that’s why it’s growing so astonishingly fast.
The issue is a refinement of policy. For example, if you look at the housing industry, there are long-term tax credits and they are an extraordinary part of the market, but there are no incentives like that in [biotech]. People need houses, but people also need health, and we can deliver that.
Biotech is also a long-term industry, but people treat it like it’s something to trade every day. We have binary events and [investors] hold their money until we get those events. Adjustments to the tax code would not cost a penny in the near-term, but would give immense returns in the long-term.
For CEOs and other leaders in industry, the message is simple: You have in your hands a treasure, but it’s a system. Nobody will protect it unless you do. You need to stand up and talk about why this is important economically.
You also need to think about transparency, and closing the gap between us and patients. The lack of public trust that has developed is driven not by biotech but by pharma. Concerns about price increases, most favored nation policies … these are not biotech issues. These are pharma issues. One is distribution and [the] manufacturing industry, and the other is the innovation industry. But the innovation industry is being colored with the same chalk as pharma.
What that means is that our obligation as CEOs is to focus on issues that are critical, open up about the importance of science and be transparent about how you make drugs and your clinical trials. That could translate into better clinical trial enrollment, for example, and eventually trust. Trust is not something soft — it’s hard economics. Those who distrust us will vote for legislation that will punish us.
Investors also play a critical role in biotech. What’s your message to them?
We have some of the bravest investors in the world, but there’s been a structural shift, and some have moved away from innovation to safer bets. Their desire is to avoid the downturns, and they are voting with their money and backing later-stage entities as opposed to early-stage candidates where innovation exists. They are not betting on the future. My request to them is, let’s think about this as a strategic industry. Don’t back early-stage entities but back the genuine future of innovation, the high-risk, high-reward long-term bets.
In three to five years, those risks will be taken to places like China and we’ll see the vast majority of novel drugs emerging from China. That has direct consequences, but if we take action today, we can reverse this. America has the most competitive system in the world but it starts with Congress saying it’s strategic, CEOs adopting this approach and capital funders thinking about long-term investments as opposed to trade.
China notably put a plan in place to support its biotech industry many years ago and the country has since become a major R&D hub. What can the U.S. learn from China’s success?
We cannot and will not follow what they’re doing as a centralized state. But we can learn from their strategic plan and build on that.
They said they were going to build API capabilities. In America, we exported that manufacturing — like a type of industrial colonialism. But we can make innovative manufacturing processes and we should do that.
They also do phenomenal testing. They incentivize their people to work very hard. They streamlined their FDA. They started to bring into their country people who know science, they started to teach the younger generation and they are incredibly competitive today. And they changed their patent policy, so there’s an enormous rise in patents coming out of that country. We should learn from that.
We need a similar declaration in the U.S. that we will remain the leader and provide our patients with the best innovation in the world.
What gives you hope that these kinds of goals might be achieved?
To draw an analogy — I don’t think anyone setting out from the East Coast to expand westward in a wagon had anything other than hope. They headed West and they thought they would find something.
I know about our extraordinary scientific base and that it’s burgeoning. I have colleagues in biotech that are so committed to finding benefits for patients. The base is there. Now we need the ear of those that are able to make changes. If enough of us can be galvanized, we will be successful. I’m on the wagon.
