Bausch + Lomb: Leadership & Innovation in Eye Care | Healthcare In Action Abbreviated

What motivates me is really solving problems for people that today are unsolvable. Sight is such a precious gift. So being able to preserve it or restore it for people who are struggling is just massive satisfaction. And so to the extent I play a small part in finding the next treatment for someone who's visually impaired or blind, that would be the holy grail for me.

Thanks for having me, John. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Sure, absolutely. Bausch + Lomb is a 172-year-old eye health company. We operate in the eye health segment in the broadest sense of the word, organized around four businesses. One is a pharmaceutical business that makes prescription medicines for eye care. We have a consumer business that makes everything you would buy in a drugstore in the eye care aisle — vitamins, drops, contact lens solution, and everything in between. We have a contact lens business that makes contact lenses around the world. And last, we have a surgical business that makes everything an ophthalmic or retina surgeon would need, whether that be lasers, capital equipment, implants, instruments, fluidics, surgical packs, gowns. So very comprehensive. The brand is an iconic brand having been around for 172 years, but many of our products are sub-branded. In the consumer space, our vitamins for people suffering with macular degeneration are known as PreserVision. Our newest contact lens launching is called Infuse in the United States. Some of our drugs address dry eye, such as Xiidra and Mibo. And in terms of cataract surgery, we have the enVista product line of implants. So we have hundreds and hundreds of brands in the eye care space.

Yeah, great question. Never easy to do. The way we went about it was to really invest in talent in R&D and go out and try to hire, promote, or develop the best R&D talent in the organization. I spent my first year really working with our head of R&D on recruiting scientists and building out the capabilities of our R&D teams. And once you have that in place, it gives you the confidence to say, 'Okay, now let's stop doing the incremental innovations. Let's get rid of some of these pipeline programs and let's make bigger investments in programs that are going to change the standard of care for patients.' The reason we believe we can do that is that we have the right people and the right talent with the right expertise and experience to lead these programs. You feel more confident as a CEO investing behind a program when you're really confident in the talent of your team. That really was the formula I deployed. It took time, but I'm really excited when I look at where we are today across all of our businesses and our pipeline. I would say it's never been stronger. We unveiled it in November at the New York Stock Exchange to our investors and got tremendous feedback on the progress we've made.

Yeah, it's a good story. Bausch + Lomb invented the mass-produced soft contact lens in 1971 — those were called hydrogels. Then in the late 90s, Bausch + Lomb invented the next new material called silicone hydrogel. For the last 25-26 years, the industry has been optimizing this material. Bausch + Lomb started it but was late to the optimization of it. So when I got here, I said it's really important that we restore ourselves back to driving innovation in material science and contact lenses. There's a real need because there are still a lot of dropouts in the industry because of end-of-day comfort. I think it was my second or third day as CEO, I went up to Rochester, New York, where our contact lens R&D team is. During the lunch hour, they set up easels with posters and teams — many of them younger talent — were presenting these posters to me. I would spend 10 minutes or so at each poster, getting to know folks. To be fair, I wasn't really so interested in what was on the poster. I was more interested in the talent behind the poster and getting to meet the people. But I get to this one poster about this novel material using hyaluronic acid as its backbone. I was really impressed by the team and the idea and the concept. I called the head of R&D and said, 'I wonder if we could turn this into a full-blown development program.' We met with the team and I said, 'Guys, you have a winning idea here. Whether we can bring it to life remains to be seen, but I want to invest in it. I'm going to meet with you guys every Friday until we figure out we can do it or we can't do it.' I gave them one requirement: not only do you have to change the game in material science, but we need to be able to manufacture this on our existing manufacturing lines, because building new lines is a multi-billion dollar investment, and I'd rather invest in the R&D than in new manufacturing capability. Over the course of the next three years, we've been meeting every Friday and the team does a lot of work between Friday to Friday. And lo and behold, they cracked the code. They figured it out. Now we're in the final stages of clinical testing on that contact lens with a target launch date for 2028.

So, the promise is best-in-class comfort. And potentially even — we'll have to see how the data plays out in the clinical studies — but potentially even better comfort at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day, because the way the lens is built using hyaluronic acid, which is your body's and your eyes' natural moisturizer, as the lens interacts with the natural enzymes in your eye, it releases more HA. So the longer you wear it, in theory, the more comfortable it should be. It's really turning the whole paradigm on its head.

Yeah, we should have data in the second half of '26. So five, six, seven months from now.

You know, if I had to pick, let's try to winnow it down to maybe two, maybe three. I think one is a realization that success is about the talent you surround yourself with. When you want to run a pharmaceutical company or a medtech company, you need really talented people on the team. I use a lot of sports analogies, but it's kind of like an American football team — you can have a great quarterback, but if you don't have a great line and great receivers and a good defense, it doesn't matter how great the quarterback is, you're not going to win Super Bowls. Super Bowls are won when the team is very talented at all positions. You need to hire people smarter and better than you to push you and challenge you. You need to give them room to operate, coach them through the tough things, and ask great questions. The second attribute I would define as curiosity. When you run a science-based company and you're not a scientist — I'm not a scientist — you have to be exceptionally curious. First thing I do when I get up is I scan the literature of all the different journals. I look at everything to read and study in order to ask questions of our talented scientists. I send out emails early in the morning, 5:30, 6 a.m.: 'Did you look at this? What about this? Have we seen this?' It's really being very curious and pushing yourself. The third attribute I learned from Fred Hassan, my mentor at Schering-Plough: humility. The organization isn't here to serve me; I'm here to serve it. My job is to make everybody else's job easier. It's not for them to work for me; it's for me to work for them. Actions speak louder than words. Just a silly example: I show up at every meeting on time. One day somebody asked me at Allergan, 'Why are you always on time?' I said, 'Look around the room. There are 18 of us in this room. If I'm late for 30 minutes, that's 9 hours of productivity lost from really great people. Not only do I want to be on time, but I want to run this meeting really efficiently because your brain power is way too important.' That's what great leaders do — realize they're there to make everybody else better, not to make themselves better.