Claude Bertrand, Senior Exec. Dir R&D Servier - Cross-functionality creates breakthrough innovation

Thank you for the question. Well, the short answer is yes, I obviously missed France. I am very attached to my country. But above all, I think it is a country with tremendous qualities, especially when it comes to research, innovation, and even development, which are, in my view, under-exploited. There are always several reasons when you think about returning home after 20 years abroad. There was also a family aspect – I wanted my children to discover French and European culture more broadly. And the last point, before I elaborate on French capabilities, is that I feel I have a duty to push innovation in France, to potentially participate in teaching and education, because France gave me a lot. I think it's important at this point to touch on education. I was helped – I was a scholarship student – and I believe I also owe it to France and the French government for allowing me to study given the environment I grew up in as a child and teenager. So all of that contributes to this return. But I think we will develop it further – there is a lot to do in France. There is a lot of innovation, but perhaps a problem of mentality, of mindset. If I can help foster that development, I would be delighted. That's what I strive to do.

Absolutely. After a career, I think it's important to know that everything depends, once again, on objectives and mindsets. I have always been driven by curiosity and risk-taking, contrary to what one might think. I don't consider myself a careerist; I followed my instinct and the opportunities that presented themselves. That means you also have to be able to take risks. At certain points in my career, I took big risks. A small anecdote: when I was at Ciba-Geigy, which became Novartis, it wasn't because of the merger of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy that my career stopped; on the contrary, I had plenty of possibilities within Novartis. But an opportunity arose on the other side of the Atlantic, at Roche, with an entire unit to build, different ways of working, etc. I thought, 'At Novartis, I risk falling asleep and falling into a routine, whereas the offer at Roche was again about construction, change, evolution.' So I think it's only afterwards that you reflect on these things. What really drove me was the desire, the passion to learn, and clearly a certain curiosity, which led me to progress, but it's not something you plan.

It wasn't so much a technology. At that time, in '96, Roche bought a company – there were 10-15 years of a lot of M&A. In '95, Roche bought a company called Syntex, which at the time was called 'the Merck of the West Coast', a very innovative company that worked a lot in transplantation. They bought this company located on the Stanford campus – an extremely innovative environment; literally you could walk to Palo Alto. And they decided to test a new model: a part of R&D that would set up on the West Coast in '96, when they were very established on the East Coast and had nothing on the West Coast yet – this was Roche before Genentech. They bought it and said, 'How can we reinvent the R&D model?' It went from basic research all the way to what we call proof of concept in humans. They let us work autonomously – it was extraordinary, very little dependence on headquarters in Basel; they came two or three times a year, and beyond that we had incredible freedom. We had extremely precise objectives on the number of proofs of concept we had to deliver in a year. And then there was the aspect of building labs from scratch, recruiting my team – we really started from almost virgin territory with some expertise from Syntex. That appealed to me. Whereas I had the prospect of progressing, being promoted, maybe moving, but it would still be a routine. And I have to say, there is another very important character trait: impatience. When you merge two monsters like Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, it takes months or even years until you can say, 'Let's do R&D again.' You spend a lot of time in integration meetings, how to organize things, etc. That's why after nine months – I did nine months, from November – I thought, 'The Roche adventure looks fascinating.'

There is a link: there is a continuous transformation of R&D. Transformation is generally driven by two things: huge technological evolutions, we'll come back to that, but in the '90s it was the explosion of genetics, genomics. Being in Palo Alto, you had a film axis right across the street, at Symyx, at the corner – we walked through these different places, and it was an explosion of chips and things. So there is always this technological evolution somewhere in the background. After that, there is a kind of search for the Holy Grail of how to increase R&D productivity in pharma – it keeps getting worse. Every time we think we've found exactly the solution, and it fails. It's linked to two main things: first, the probability of success is weakening year after year. Between concept and market, it used to be about 10% chance of success. Today, in some areas – it's very disease-dependent – but in oncology today, the probability of success is maybe 2%. Yet everyone invests, which is why it's expensive – because a lot of things fail. And second, it's a regulated field. I think our audience knows, but it's always more complicated, always longer. So you add those two factors. When you look at the number of products approved by the FDA or EMA, it's fairly stable. There's a small spike – you think you've found the trick – then it goes down again. There hasn't been a drastic change. So it's technological evolution with very significant steps, but we are still in one of the most complicated areas: human biology and pathology. And you often see in journals, when you talk to old-timers like me, 'The simple discoveries have been made.' So the last great discoveries... I was involved in the statin programs at AstraZeneca, for example. Statins and lipid management was a wonderful discovery that works in a huge population. I think we'll find fewer and fewer like that.

Tomorrow, it depends – tomorrow in five years? Well, there is still a lot to do in oncology, a lot to do in rare diseases – I think that's a huge area. Inflammation, and then I think we also need to take care of therapeutic areas we think are covered yet we still die from or have long, difficult diseases. I'm thinking of cardiometabolism – everything cardiovascular, metabolic diseases. Today we have statins, we have the whole pharmacological arsenal to treat them, but the problem is treatment adherence. That's a big work for the pharmaceutical industry – not just bringing new innovations, but also managing follow-up, care, and ensuring people actually take their medication. Often hypertension is a relatively silent disease until it becomes dramatic and too late. That's more in the field of technology – well, when you start combining mechanisms of action to improve adherence, you put several well-known, often older mechanisms into one capsule – what I call incremental research, not disruptive innovation. But just to say that when you look at the diseases of tomorrow, there are those with no treatment, and there are many in oncology as I said, but even in areas we think we can treat, there are still issues. That's also part of R&D.

Before getting into technical considerations, I think what has fundamentally changed in recent years is the approach to finding new mechanisms of action in diseases with high unmet need. That approach is putting the patient at the center. Maybe we'll talk later about what we are doing at Servier with our new R&D centers. What I have pushed enormously is to truly put the patient at the center of our research. What does that mean? Was it not done before? No. Previously, research was done by scientists and researchers, and I think – generalizing in this debate – but largely over the last 20-30 years, we started from science and projects, whether industrial or academic, and said, 'I found a new target, let's link it to a potentially pathological organ,' but it was really driven by science. What I often say is that today, to increase the chances of success, we must absolutely start a project because it is demonstrated to be linked to the pathology we are interested in. That means we really bring the patient, bring the patient's bedside to the bench. It has other effects, too – from a motivation perspective, I think we now work much more to bring researchers and patients as close as possible. Researchers need meaning in what they do, which wasn't necessarily the case before. But ensuring that – and I think this will contribute to increasing the probability of success of these projects – is having maximum patient information to say, 'By modulating this target, there's a chance we can succeed.' So it's moving towards more personalized medicine.

For now, I prefer to use the term 'precision medicine' because 'personalized' would become economically very complicated – literally developing a treatment per patient. I think we are still very far from that. But precision medicine, that's certain. And the idea, again, is that beyond the start of a research project, we can then follow the development of this future product in the patient because we have measurable markers – through plasma measurements, potentially biopsies – so we can really ensure the activity of the product as early as possible, especially in chronic diseases where you sometimes have to wait two, three, five years to be sure it works. So it also helps with the subsequent development and early years of launch.

There are many. I'll start with the patient, because at the end of this journey, the patient is what matters. In the interaction with the researcher, in supporting development, but also increasingly as one of the most important interlocutors for operations. So we need to work on how we engage with the patient, how to get operations people interested in what we do in R&D. We do that a lot at Servier. We now have an extraordinary showcase, and we bring country managers, medical visitors to our R&D centers. It gives them a sense of the energy and passion involved in developing the product they will eventually deliver to healthcare professionals and ultimately patients. So it's a lot of communication, exchange, interaction.

It's an absolutely wonderful adventure. The reasons for this choice were first to be able to regroup all our R&D teams on a single site. Historically, Servier's R&D teams were on several sites in the Paris region – here in Suresnes, in Croissy, and also the historic R&D centers near Orléans. So the idea was to regroup them, and once we had decided to regroup them in modern buildings more suited to today's technologies, Saclay quickly imposed itself as the location of choice. That ties in elegantly with our earlier remarks about French research and innovation. The Saclay plateau already represents, in health sciences but also mathematics and the hardest sciences, 25% of French R&D. I think we are approaching American-style campuses. And there's another secret ingredient – the secret sauce – is to associate major research institutes, large universities, grandes écoles, interested industrialists, and potentially incubators. There's also a very important political ingredient: politicians really need to push this and put it on the strategic agenda. I think that's what's happening at Saclay. So we made this choice. We were lucky to have a very good architect, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, to accompany us. And we have built this, which is opening little by little. The first teams started moving in mid-February, and the complete move will be finished by summer.

There will be 1,500 people on site. A certain number are moving; there are also people who have decided not to follow, so we will hire quite a bit over the next six months. The idea is to recreate a very integrated site – what we like to call a 'campus within the campus'. Why 'campus'? Because we have all R&D functions and support functions – a lot of IT, digital, data. So there are teams that are not pure R&D but support us. And an incubator, which we thought was very important – to recreate this campus with an incubator and library, operated with BioLabs, a world leader in incubator operations.

I have always been of the principle – and honestly, for at least 20-25 years, I have only worked in the context of partnerships. So I have promoted, for at least 20 years, what we call open innovation. I think innovation is not the property of one or the other. We'll come back to risk-taking because I think pharma also takes big risks. But it's certain that we must cultivate the crossing of paths, transversality, which creates disruptive innovations. I may be stating the obvious, but I'm not sure many implement it – the 'water cooler innovation': you meet someone at the water cooler, no intention of talking about work, but you're stuck on a problem for a week, and someone from a completely different background says, 'Oh, I saw the same situation in my field,' and that's how innovation happens. So we really need to create that transversality. And then we need to open up to the outside. We decided that part of our building is truly open to the outside. Tomorrow, if you go to Saclay, you can enter Servier without a badge – you have to go through reception, but there's a common area, a cafeteria, a real exchange zone modeled on Anglo-Saxon campuses. They've proven themselves. And then there is a mindset aspect: you have to take risks. I am lucky to be part of a group governed by a foundation; we have zero shareholders. All profits are reinvested for the benefit of the group and therefore for patients. That's an incredible opportunity, and we can take more risks than others who have to report quarterly to shareholders. That said, it's easier when you start from zero – you have nothing to lose, everything to gain, so you take more risks than an established company. But again, I think it's the permeability between different worlds that will create tomorrow's innovation. After Covid, people think, 'Oh yes, tomorrow's innovation comes from small companies.' That's not true, obviously, because we never talk about the 90% that never took off and crashed. What gets me up every morning is the patient. And the fact that this is a patient business – it's a patient business. You need thick skin, broad shoulders, because you fail more often than you succeed. When you succeed, it's a delight. So you have to move.

Again, we said billions of dollars and 15 years – you never know the work of one person. But when you have worked, whatever point in the value chain, on a product that eventually reaches the market – I had the chance to work on anti-IgE antibodies for allergies and asthma at Ciba-Geigy. Xolair is still on the market today. It wasn't a huge product, but it was extremely innovative – the very beginning of biologics and monoclonal antibodies. That's a huge pride. There have been a few others. But what I can tell you is that what makes me most proud is what we are doing at Servier. Not because it's the last company – I always say I learned things everywhere – but what we are doing in oncology at Servier, attacking the metabolism of the cancer cell, we are awaiting European registration for the first product. And then we will deliver all the results on a second product at ASCO in early June in glioblastoma. Honestly, I think these are small revolutions. That's why you work 30 or 35 years for 2 or 3 intense moments, but they are really intense. You feel you have a real impact on certain pathologies, and that's incredible. I am not afraid to say that I think I have one of the best jobs in the world. But you have to keep that in mind. When I talked about researchers not falling into routine – I think one of the big evolutions I see in recent years is that you see it through potentially proposing to your own children: the new generations need meaning in what they do. And I think we have a dream job to give meaning to your life. That's why I say it has to be a patient business because I think you can't do it without a burning passion. But the potential impact is fantastic.

Pharma in 30 years is having even more treatments for diseases that today have none. It's being able to get to market much faster – at least making these products available faster. I am absolutely convinced of that. Even the agencies that regulate us are evolving. The pharmacist's role is no longer to give a placebo to a patient. I mean, for me it's ethically very complicated to say we still often give hundreds or even thousands of patients a sugar pill instead of a drug that might save them. So a lot of it is about increasing the probability of success, coming faster, with... I am totally biased in this matter, but data, digital, and artificial intelligence – honestly, my eyes light up. I am a good customer. But this is an exploding field, still in its infancy. I don't make promises I can't keep, but again, intuition: I have the intuition that this will really change R&D and pharma. It will also change operations – we will completely change our model in the next 10 years, I am convinced. There is a lot of hype, a lot of showmanship, but fundamentally there is a real groundswell, and I think that's the next technological revolution for our industry.

No, no, it's true. We had an explosion of data during genomics and the resolution of the human genome in the early 2000s. I don't know if that gave us 2.0 or 3.0, so the next one is clearly 4.0. I think it will really move the lines. But again, it's big, big risk-taking because it's blossoming. And to put France back at the center of the world map – in this field, France is very well placed in mathematics. Most of the 'benefils' (probably referring to AI researchers/startups?) are French.

I think first, from a personal perspective, we are in healthcare, so we must be as exemplary as possible. We can come back to the issues we deal with and how we will try to address them. But I am also a father of six children, grandfather of three recently. So as a citizen responsible for a large family, I must not only think about it but also try to act in personal and professional life. I think we are at the very beginning. There is a real awareness. At Servier, we have a full CSR plan, which is part of our strategic roadmap for 2030. We have extremely precise objectives, and it's really what oversees our entire strategy.

That's an excellent question. In fact, I think we are almost all the time – I would even say every day – oscillating between projecting ourselves over very long periods and then, somehow, cutting that time into more human, closer dimensions that allow us to keep hoping that we will go all the way. That's it. That's why I found the question about the link to operations very interesting. We are constantly in a back-and-forth movement between this projection and asking, 'What am I learning from what's happening now? How can I impact things in the short and medium term?' I think that's very important. And that's maybe the luxury of pharma that a biotech doesn't have – it's not just about disruptive innovation, thinking, 'If I'm right, I affect future generations.' I think there are also many things to do in supporting existing emerging products. There is a second aspect, more recent for me: the desire to pass on knowledge. Because in a career like mine, if you have a thirst for learning, you have learned so much that you think, 'I have to pass it on.' I think I spend a lot more time today on interviews like this, giving lectures, exchanging with students. It nourishes me – it's another curiosity: how to make them work better together, how to give them more meaning, develop their passion. That's also by exchanging – because after all, you start to get old! But clearly, things have evolved a lot. There is this desire to pass on, and that contributes to saying, 'Yes, maybe some things I do today I won't see the end of the tunnel – it will still be a bit further away – but at least I have had an impact at other levels.' So what drives me a lot is impact. It's patience, and it's leaving a trace, something useful. So again, this back-and-forth between the very long term and the short term.

Yes. That's interesting; I would have developed this aspect more. Because when you lead your career the way I did, in a way you listened to yourself, perhaps without knowing it, following your intuitions, your desires to take more or less risk, etc. So in that sense, you listen to yourself. I think what you learn over time is that in leadership and management, to get your teams on board, you need to know yourself extremely well. It's about knowing what will truly trigger in others the desire to follow you, the desire to be authentic, to trigger engagement. I think authenticity is key. And knowing yourself is part of that. It's not something you fabricate; it's what you have deep inside. If you manage to convey that, I can tell you that you bring many people on board. Again, in this field, there are many other technological fields of the same nature, but it's teamwork – it's not one person. That's the hardest part in pharma, in biotech: taking people who all come from the same academic background, who have only learned – excuse the expression – to elbow each other for funding, each in their own lab, don't copy, etc., with the same backgrounds, and bringing them into a company to work hand in hand simply because if we don't all get in the same boat, we'll never succeed. It's already complicated normally, but if we are in disarray, we won't make it. So these are qualities you acquire. Management, leadership – you don't learn it on school benches; you feel it little by little in your career, if you have the skills or not. But authenticity is key.

I have two: 'The future belongs to those who get up early' and 'Life is too short to miss a minute, a second.' That resonates with me. In my close circle, it tires them a bit, but I have this notion. That's why I told you: you have to move through the time scales. In a job where you often work on long timeframes, I cannot stand the idea of wasting a second of my day. Sleep is frankly a big waste of time.

Since Claude – last question: what advice would you give to a young student or someone starting a career in R&D?

If he or she has already chosen to do R&D, they've already done half the journey. But really, follow your passion, because it will be a lot of work. When I was 25 – and I think being 25 today is still a lot of work – you need to have that passion embedded in you. That doesn't decide itself; it triggers itself. But if you have that passion, follow your intuitions. Because honestly, I repeat, it's one of the most beautiful jobs in the world, and we need it. There aren't enough doctors, not enough people in healthcare. There is so much to do.

Not one mentor, but I have had many people in my career – also on the private side – who sparked things in me, took me to the next level. Unsurprisingly, if I chose this profession, if I chose to do a thesis – I was already a pharmacist – it was a professor at the university, the supervisor I chose to oversee my postdoc in the US. I am still in contact with him; he is almost 95 years old, a wonderful man. So yes, there have been many throughout my career. In the choices I made, you always have a boss – even when you are not in a biotech, you have a boss or a main shareholder. That's also very important. I think I was incapable of working for people who didn't nourish me, for whom I didn't have some form of admiration, attraction, and the need to exchange. So it's not a single trigger; it's a succession of people who punctuated and supported my career.

Thank you very much for this opportunity. See you soon.