EXECUTIVE SPOTLIGHT
Influenza Vaccine Exec: Differentiation in Product, Marketing and Leadership unachievable to many, and annoyed the competition.
Brent MacGregor has been around the world, with some of the top companies in the vaccines industry. He put in 16 years at Sanofi Pasteur, most recently serving as Managing Director in Japan. Following Sanofi Pasteur, he was president of Novartis Vaccines U.S. and then CEO for Influenza Vaccines. At that point, Novartis was involved in selling their influenza vaccines business to the Australian company CSL That vaccine company eventually became Seqirus, where Brent became SVP for Global Commercial Operations. His vision, from 2016 on, was to establish a portfolio of differentiated influenza vaccines despite the traditional image of the flu business as a commodity enterprise. How he accomplished that was the best part of the story. It involved everything from identifying and building a leadership team to changing the image of the product, and ultimately helping to lift the company from a negative balance sheet to profitability that seemed 9 | HS&M JULY/AUGUST 2020
A PRODUCT PERCEIVED AS COMMODITIZED, A COMPANY IN THE RED CSL had an existing vaccines business and folded the Novartis business into it, creating the company name Seqirus to indicate a new entity. Brent moved from CEO/ Global Head of the entire Novartis Influenza business to SVP Commercial Operations of the new Seqirus entity in 2016. At this point, the company was unprofitable. CSL informed the market (the Australian Stock Exchange, ASX) that they intended to make it profitable by the end of their 2018 fiscal year. Today, Seqirus offers a portfolio of differentiated seasonal influenza vaccines, based on their innovative cell-culture and adjuvant platforms, a pandemic countermeasures business, and in Australia and New Zealand a suite of in-licensed vaccines and pharma products. Traditionally, influenza was seen as a commoditized space where vaccines were made the same way, regardless of manufacturer, using egg-based manufacturing technology. The only way to “differentiate” was through aspects like pricing and speed of delivery rather than product efficacy, because no one could claim a better medical benefit from their vaccine. The World Health Organization, WHO, identifies flu strains each year and provides the virus seed stock to each manufacturer to develop their branded vaccines. But physicians and pharmacists alike
often substitute the brand they have in stock for another that’s considered comparable. Recently, innovative vaccines have started to come onto the market and it was up to Seqirus to differentiate its own innovative vaccines from those its competitors. THE MARKETING STRATEGY: DIFFERENTIATION WHERE NONE EXISTED BEFORE; A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE WHERE IT DID Brent formed a seven-person leadership team from former Novartis and CSL executives. All the members were competent in their own realm, but Brent realized that this does not necessarily lead to a well-functioning team. To create that bond, he first built a common belief in the product and the mission. Since each flu season differs from the last, it is important to generate real world evidence (RWE) from the flu season just passed to demonstrate that your vaccine actually performed as you said it would, in the context of what your clinical trial showed. It was critical for the Medical Affairs team to demonstrate the effectiveness of the cell derived product, and of the enhanced immune response offered by adjuvants. The next task was to build a capability in government affairs, in public policy, and in health economics, as well as a marketing strategy. The challenge was to advocate to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other healthcare authorities to recommend Seqirus vaccines. In the case
