Actavis CEO: You Have To Be Committed To R&D And Innovation To Be Successful Long-Term In Our Industry

Brent Saunders, CEO of Actavis plc ACT, was recently on CNBC to talk about innovation at Actavis and successful model to follow for big pharma companies.

Innovation At Actavis

“We have as a company, our legacy companies whether it’s been Forest or Actavis have discovered medicine and have launched many medicines,” Saunders said. “In fact, we have launched several last year, we are going to launch 5 or 6 this year. We just don’t do that basic discovery, but innovation is a continuum and so if we in-license a very early molecule and we put it into humans and we do the clinical work and we get it launched and we figure out how to make it and scale it up and do that all that work, is that not innovation?.”

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“I think you have to be committed to R&D and innovation to be successful long-term in our industry,” Saunders  replied. “However, you have to do things that you have a comparable advantage doing and so for us we didn’t have an advantage in discovery, we had plenty of access to early stage molecules from universities from venture backed companies and the like.”

He continued, “However, as we are completing the acquisition of Allergan they have some real deep expertise in discovery in neurotoxins and ophthalmology and we are going to keep that. In fact we are going to have a budget of R&D of about $1.7 billion this year.”