In a candid conversation with BioPharma APAC, Glen Godresse, CEO of Menarini Asia-Pacific, reflects on his first 100 days at the helm, highlighting the challenges and achievements that have shaped his leadership journey. With a clear strategic vision, Godresse is steering Menarini APAC towards new growth opportunities, emphasizing the importance of partnerships, innovation, and a steadfast commitment to improving patient outcomes across the region. As the company strengthens its presence in key markets and expands into emerging therapeutic areas, Godresse's leadership is set to redefine the future of healthcare in Asia-Pacific.

Reflecting on the First 100 Days: Glen, could you share some of the key achievements and challenges you’ve encountered during your first 100 days as CEO of Menarini Asia-Pacific?

It’s been an exciting and rewarding first 100 days. My priority has been to spend as much time as possible with the different regional and country teams, listening to the business opportunities and challenges they face and hearing about their ideas about how to improve the way we do things. As a company that is built on partnerships, it has been important to spend time with current and future alliance partners, building on the strong foundation of communication and trust that was established by my predecessor Maurizio Luongo.

As CEO it is easy to be consumed by daily ‘fire-fighting’ and the reality is that the more senior the role, the more difficult and complex the daily decision making becomes. It isn’t easy to strike a balance between operational and strategic discussions amongst our country and regional leadership teams. Overall, I found that we were too busy trying to do everything and needed a clearer strategic framework to clarify where we want to play and how to win. We have just aligned as a leadership team on our strategic roadmap, in the process bringing greater clarity and focus to the key markets and therapeutic areas for growth in APAC beyond China, including our Business Development strategy. 

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed sharing our vision for the region with our global leadership team and business partners. We’ve been having some great conversations and sharing ideas on how our performance can continue to go from strength to strength. It’s encouraging to see how the teams are committed to, and united in, driving greater success across the region with a filter of improving patient care and serving unmet healthcare needs of our communities - a mission that extends far beyond profit generation. 

Importantly, we have been able to deliver some tangible wins in the past few months. For example, a testament to the trust our partners place in us is the recent expansion or our partnership with Pharmacosmos. Just six months in, we’ve expanded our initial agreement to distribute MonoFer®, an innovative iron deficiency treatment in Australia, to also include Singapore and Malaysia. We have also extended numerous agreements with existing partners beyond the initial contact period.

Increasing patient access to our medicines is central to mission. We continue to make progress with both geographical expansion and working with local governments to fund our medicines and make them available to general populations in markets like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. While we’re already well-established in 13 Asia-Pacific markets, a key priority has been to broaden our presence in emerging markets. Today, we have a growing presence in Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar with our Pain and Dermatology portfolio. We are also planning to extend our reach into other therapeutic areas, including Specialty Care, Cardiology, Gastroenterology, and Aesthetics. 

On a personal front, I have tried to maintain my health and fitness routine. I challenged myself by competing in the recent Spartan Super 10km/25 obstacle course race in Singapore. There are many parallels between my passion for fitness and my leadership philosophy. Both are about embracing new challenges and discovering one’s own resilience, agility and resolve to overcome daily challenges and obstacles.  

Strategic Initiatives: What strategic initiatives have you implemented or plan to implement to strengthen Menarini’s position in the Asia-Pacific healthcare market?

Our success in primary care and consumer health across the region provides a strong foundation to look to expand our footprint in specialty care. While primary care will remain central to our business, we are committed to investing in niche specialty areas where there is significant unmet patient need and high demand for treatments for difficult to manage conditions. We continue to explore areas such as anti-infectives and rare diseases. 

We’re also strengthening our digital capability to deepen our engagement with healthcare professionals and support patient care. This includes making strategic hires within and outside our industry, investments in omni-channel marketing, and adopting emerging technologies such as AI. Over the past year, our digital campaigns have achieved high engagement rates, surpassing industry standards, and generating actionable insights that will continue to drive our commercial success in the region. 

As I’ve mentioned, long-term partnerships are crucial to our success in growing our product portfolio. We continue to build on our existing partnerships to launch new offerings while establishing new relationships with companies that have an innovative pipeline of assets but lack capabilities to commercialize them in our region.

Partnership with Pharmacosmos: Could you provide more insights into the expanded partnership with Pharmacosmos and the anticipated impact of MonoFer® in Singapore and Malaysia?

Menarini has evolved from a company with Contract Sales Organization (CSO) roots, to a fully-fledged pharmaceutical company, with capabilities and a track record of shaping markets and bringing innovative medications to patients who need them. Our unique business model and end-to-end commercialization capability has been instrumental in enabling us to manage over 200 brands across the Asia-Pacific region and impact nearly 11 million lives daily. 

Our partnership with Pharmacosmos exemplifies how we build upon our relationships to improve access to innovative healthcare brands for patients while offering our partners a single point of entry into Asia-Pacific markets. Under the expanded agreement, we will now make MonoFer®, an innovative iron deficiency treatment, available to patients in Singapore and Malaysia, in addition to Australia. Iron deficiency is a major public health challenge that affects people across diverse demographics. I’m confident that our strong in-market capabilities will facilitate access to this important therapy for more patients. This underscores our dedication to advancing patient care through innovative therapies that address critical unmet medical needs in the region. 

Future Vision: How do you envision the future of Menarini Asia-Pacific under your leadership, especially in terms of innovation and market expansion?

Looking ahead, we need to become more choiceful about what we focus on, with the main priority being to strengthen our portfolio but never losing sight of our mission of bringing healthcare innovations to underserved patient groups via our partnership model. We plan to focus on markets and therapeutic areas that are not currently on the radar of big pharma companies, but with high unmet clinical needs, whether it be in primary care, specialty care, consumer health or rare diseases.

As a company we will focus on continuing to build our business in China but at the same time see tremendous opportunities to continue to grow in SEA and markets like Australia and India. We don’t want to be a company that just serves wealthier patient populations and are working hard on our market access strategy in many markets to ensure patients who can’t afford expensive medications or don’t have private health insurance, can still access our medications. We also plan to continue to build our footprint in the truly emerging markets in our region including Cambodia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, which may not be a profitable venture today, but where patient need is the highest.

Expanding our therapeutic footprint and enhancing patient care through innovative treatments and personalized healthcare solutions will be our priority. By leveraging our dynamic partnership model, our goal is not only to sustain our growth momentum but to also lead the industry in transforming healthcare experiences and improving quality of life for patients throughout the region.

Patient-Centric Approach: How is Menarini ensuring that its treatments and services remain focused on improving patient outcomes and addressing unmet medical needs in the region?

The first step is to understand our unique region and each individual market, then focus our product and business development efforts on the treatments that patients need the most. Patient needs in developed markets like the US or Europe are not always the same as those in Asia-Pacific, not just in terms disease burden / unmet clinical needs, but also affordability and ability to access medicines. What sets us apart from many other multi-national companies is that we employ a Glocalized approach which means that, while we do manage some global and regional assets, we don’t ‘force fit’ products to every market and give our local subsidiaries flexibility and autonomy to grow brands under their care and act on the unmet needs in their communities. 

Entrusting this responsibility to those who know the local context best is key to our success in many markets, especially in SEA, where we have become a top 20 ranked pharmaceutical company in some markets. While we have core regional therapeutic areas of focus such as Cardiology and Dermatology, we have built successful franchises in some markets in areas such as Neurology, Gastrointestinal and Rare Diseases.

Our work doesn’t end once a treatment is in-market. We are committed to ensure that patients who need the medications the most can access them. In fact, we have recently invested more in building market access capabilities with the goal of ensuring our products are available to more patients. Recently we have been successful in listing some of our cardiology products on local ‘universal coverage’ reimbursement schemes and we have numerous other submissions underway. Often this requires us to substantially reduce our prices, but we feel passionate about providing access to medicines to patients who need them, and we do not want to be a company that just serves the needs of patients in wealthy countries.

We also work collaboratively with the medical community in each market to enhance patient care. One recent initiative exemplifying this commitment is Menarini Indonesia’s partnership with the Indonesian Pediatric Dermatology Study Group and other leading medical associations to co-launch a national atopic dermatitis (AD) guidebook for healthcare professionals. This guidebook empowers over 5,000 dermatologists, pediatricians and general practitioners with the latest knowledge to manage this chronic skin condition more effectively and, ultimately, achieve better health outcomes for their patients. 

Finally, we are mindful that Asia is often an overlooked market when it comes to investment in clinical trials, and that the learnings from real world evidence generation in Asian patients can greatly enhance patient care in our region.  

One example is the recent REKOVER study. This is a first-of-its-kind real world, digital study on 600 patients across four Asian countries investigating the efficacy of a fixed-dose combination (FDC) drug in treating moderate to severe acute pain. The outcomes from this study have provided valuable insights to Healthcare Practitioners and enhanced patient care when it comes to the use of acute pain medications. 

Another example is a large ongoing real world, digital study titled HYIMPACT across seven Asian countries in patients suffering from Hypertension. This study aims to evaluate treatment efficacy, exploring patient profiles while measuring cardiovascular outcomes. Generative artificial intelligence, big data analytics and social listening are some of the new-age methods currently being evaluated to enhance the scope of our patient centric engagement. 

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arcilla.fran@biopharmaapac.com