More impressively, the former director-level employee at Swiss healthcare giant Novartis who is preparing to launch a life sciences business has somehow managed to juggle it all while raising a family, writing a business plan and studying a part-time MBA.
For a decade-long corporate worker at a big pharma firm, a relatively humble start-up might seem an unlikely occupation. The St. Gallen MBA graduate admits she had little knowledge of raising a company from the ground.
“I had massive budgets but never learned how to earn the cash. I only knew how to spend it,” says Trudi from her Basel base. “How do you make money? Marketing, sales – the whole finance piece was something I never had to spend much time on. “
For a vice president who was responsible for some 300 people in five different cities around the world, you’d think confidence would be in good supply. The start-up world, however, is different.
Trudi had “promised” herself to pursue an MBA in later-life. The St. Gallen course she completed last August gave her the gravitas that she was seemingly missing.
“I needed the bits that were missing to start my own business. It did more than that – the content that I didn’t know enough of and on other hand a huge network of people in different walks of life, way outside of the pharma industry,” says Trudi. “This gave me huge insight into everything else and got me more excited,” she adds.
Trudi, born to a Swiss father and a British mother and who was raised in the UK, had a similar dilemma when she was at Novartis, where one of her start-up’s co-founders was a colleague.
After working as a global department head in regulatory affairs in Switzerland, the firm offered her a job in the United States as head of global research operations. It proved too good an offer to turn down.
“I took the whole family with me. My husband also works in the company, and we put the kids into local school, and I took over the global responsibility for research operations,” says Trudi. “It was a huge role.”
But the constant travel across the globe began to take its toll. Her kids were approaching teenage years and were in need of their mother, surprisingly, more than ever. “So I decided I wanted to go back to Basel,” she says.
By that point the company’s values and Trudi’s values began “diverging”. Was her heart really still in it at that point? “I just didn’t feel that this was really what I wanted to continue to do… the problem is the higher you go up in a company, the less freedom you have.”
“I decided I was going to go off and do the MBA I’d always promised myself. I signed up at St. Gallen,” she adds.
She arrived at the Swiss business school from pharma-land during a three-year stint as compliance director at Novartis. She studied part-time, commuting from Basel to the school’s namesake town.
A full-time MBA degree would have been higher-risk, she says. “I still had quite a lot, financially, invested in the company. You’ve got your bonuses and stock options, and I just felt I’d rather find a role within the organization which allows me to keep my hand in… but still gives me time and freedom to go off and do an MBA.”
Her successor at Novartis will come into a business which is in good health. The drugs company announced a multibillion-dollar reshaping of its portfolio of businesses in April, in a deal with the UK’s GlaxoSmithKline. It is thought the trade will give Novartis a stronger position in the consumer healthcare sector. Novartis also posted a 23% jump in net profits in the first quarter of 2014, after selling off a diagnostics unit.
Big pharma is all in the past for Trudi, though. She has been flexing her muscles to get a comparatively tiny business up and running. The CEO of PerioC Ltd, a UK-registered life sciences start-up, has ambitious plans for her fledgling company.
She wrote the business plan as part of the St. Gallen MBA after an ex Novartis colleague pitched her the idea. If you like the plan, once I graduate, let’s talk?
“He offered me the opportunity to take on the whole thing,” says Trudi. She grabbed it with both hands, and has been running the show – virtually; they have no physical office – for the past three months.
Five people involved with managing the business have invested about £500,000 of personal capital into PerioC. A sixth start-uper will join them soon. The company has no other employees.
Despite not coming up with the idea, Trudi admits she is the best person to run the business. “Everyone else is a specialist and I’m more of the generalist.”
The whole concept is very secretive. PerioC has a compound – which they can’t name – which has already been on the market in a different product for 30 years, they say.
PerioC is developing that compound into a treatment for treating periodontitis – a gum disease which can result in major damage to the soft tissue and bone that support the teeth, and even tooth loss.
Today’s treatment, says Trudi, is a dentist scraping the inflamed area free of plaque and “getting rid of the bacteria”. “But a lot of very severe, large pockets do not naturally heal and you will lose the tooth eventually. We have a compound which should stop the underlying inflammation.”
PerioC has applied for a formulation patent, because the drug itself has never been used before in this way. The patent will be key to their success.
But the biggest hurdle for Trudi and co will be passing clinical trials, which will see the drug tested on 20 people this year. Because the compound is already used in another product, they have something of a head-start.
“The toxicology is extremely well known,” says Trudi.
She adds: “We’re in positive territory at this point… we’ve had one discussion with a health authority in Europe already and they are very excited. For us, hoping it works, then we stand a good chance of getting this on the market in the next three years.”
But there is another potential stumbling block for team PerioC: the firm’s technology. “The one thing that is likely to put a hold on things would be if the formulation we’ve developed doesn’t allow us to sufficiently bring the dose to the inflamed skin, which allows the inflammation to be reduced,” says Trudi.
It’s the pharma tech, she says, which will be a hindrance. It could prove to be Trudi’s biggest health check yet.
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