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Exclusive Life Science Feature The Art Of The Turnaround Insight From The Chairman Of The Board By Rob Wright T here are many reasons and motivations why business leaders decide to start a pharmaceutical company — make money, gain prestige, leave a legacy, etc. Or perhaps they do this simply because of a desire to fill a perceived market need and help people. For Leonard Jacob, M.D., Ph.D., it was the desire to link science to medicine and business. By the age of 34, Jacob had risen to the position of worldwide VP of pharmaceutical development at SmithKline & French Labs (now GlaxoSmithKline). A mere five years later, he had had enough of Big Pharma. "What you have is a bureaucracy where there is constant review, prioritization, and reprioritization, resulting in a management fiasco of private teams making decisions without the line authority to fund them," he states. To realize his desire to link science to medicine and business, he felt he would have to do so in an entrepreneurial venue and exit the security of Big Pharma. Since that day, the 35-year industry veteran has cofounded a pharmaceutical company that was eventually dissolved, founded another that was acquired for $190 million, and served as the chairman of the board of two publicly traded companies — Bradley Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Nycomed and subsequently acquired by Takeda) and Antares Pharma (NASDAQ: ATRS), a specialty pharmaceutical company created through the merger of Permatec and Medi-Ject Pharmaceuticals. What he has learned through these experiences is how to go about assessing and fixing a troubled company. ASSESS THE PRODUCT FIRST – THEN THE LEADERSHIP Shortly after leaving his position as chairman of the board for Bradley Pharmaceuticals in 2006, Jacob received a call from 38 LifeScienceLeader.com October 2013 Jacques Gonella, Ph.D., then chairman of the board for Antares Pharma. "He was in Africa and called me in a panic, saying, 'Len, I need you to be chairman, and I need you to be chairman now,'" Jacob recalls. Gonella had founded Permatec, which merged with Medi-Ject Pharmaceuticals to form Antares. Jacob joined the company officially in 2007 and took over as chairman of the board in 2008. When he received that phone call from Gonella, the company's market value was around $29 million. Jacob believes that when assessing a company for growth, although the management team and financials are two common factors to consider, the most important is product opportunity. "If you look at the core principles — good technology, good products, good patents — you can't take those away. If companies have good products, they should generate revenue. If they aren't generating revenue, 9 times out of 10, it's people performance." According to Jacob, commercial failure is often the result of a breakdown between linking the bench to the bedside. To build value in a company, you need the commercial element that comes not only from having good products being developed at the bench, but from understanding how to link that science to how a patient will actually use the product. "In order to do so, you can't hire physicians who are merely clinicians and don't understand the science," he states. "Conversely, you can't have scientists developing products who have no experience with how the patient will actually use it." If a company has good products (which Jacob determined Antares had), you next need to look at the leadership. To do this, Jacob tapped into his past experience as a CEO of InKine, a company he founded in 1997 but eventually sold since he realized he