MoForever Alumni News - Winter 2019

MoForever Winter 2019 | 6 To what do you attribute the rapid growth? It’s been a really interesting trajectory. Some of our growth, particularly in the first few years after I joined in 2012, has come from mergers and acquisitions. Jazz merged with an Irish company called Azur and then acquired a company called EUSA. We not only picked up new products, but new offices in Dublin, Oxford, and Philadelphia, as well as across Europe. We also built a manufacturing facility in Ireland, and acquired another company with a manufacturing facility in Villa Guardia in Italy. We went from being a small Palo Alto-based company to being a global company with headquarters in Dublin in a very short time. Several of the products we acquired were in the area of hematology/oncology—blood cancers like leukemia—and at the time, that was a new area for the company. More recently, Jazz has been transforming itself from a company that buys products that are already approved for commercial launch into an integrated biopharmaceutical company. That means we are expanding our own research and clinical development, to build our own product-development pipeline. And that’s happening in parallel for both of our main therapeutic areas— sleep medicine and hematology/ oncology. What are some of the challenges posed by the regulatory complexities of working in the European Union? Our business in the European Union (EU) continues to expand. I will say that as an American lawyer, I used to think that navigating state vs. federal law was complicated. But it turns out that was nothing compared to trying to figure out how to defend IP in the EU, with all of the overlapping systems of national law and regulation. We are fortunate to have our own legal and compliance team there, but we really rely on outside counsel to help us navigate the various issues. For example, Chris Lyon in MoFo’s Palo Alto office has been a huge support in the privacy area, helping us with practical business advice in implementing new European privacy and data protection laws. Can you share a success story about how a legal matter contributed to Jazz Pharmaceutical’s bottom line? I guess I think of it a little differently. If I had to line it up I would say that my job is to manage legal matters in a way that creates space for the business to operate and thrive. Since I started at Jazz, I have been managing ANDA litigation involving Xyrem, our flagship product. In all, nine companies filed ANDAs to make a generic version of Xyrem that would infringe our patents, and the company has pursued patent litigation against all nine. We recently settled the last remaining case—all nine companies will have patent licenses to launch a generic version of Xyrem before the patents expire. But by settling these cases, we have ensured that our development team has the room to innovate and develop new products and indications, and grow the business in anticipation of eventual generic competition based on certainty of settlements rather than the uncertainty of ongoing litigation. What are some trends you see in the pharmaceutical industry? It’s a really exciting time if you look at the patient-centric development that is going on, and the remarkable scientific progress that is being made in so many diseases. Many in the field would say it is one of the most exciting times to be in the biological sciences. The industry is developing treatments and even cures for what were once seen as intractable conditions. On the other hand, we seem to be building an unsustainable system in which patients have to fight an uphill battle with payers just to get “MANY IN THE FIELD WOULD SAY IT IS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING TIMES TO BE IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES. THE INDUSTRY IS DEVELOPING TREATMENTS AND EVEN CURES FOR WHAT WERE ONCE SEEN AS INTRACTABLE CONDITIONS.”