CEO Spotlight: Riding the waves of Covid

Flic Gabbay, managing partner of Wokingham-based pharmaceutical services company tranScrip, has spent the past year playing whack-a-mole with the Covid-19 virus.

Her team of specialists have helped pharmaceutical companies conduct over £50 million of research since she co-founded the company in 2008, and the past year has been marked by an unprecedented urgency in the field.    

Each time tranScrip tried to implement potentially life-saving drug treatment trials, the coronavirus wave would change direction. Either it was so high that everyone was too busy saving lives, or the wave was too low and there weren’t enough trial subjects. Against this backdrop of pressing need and the accelerated development of treatments and vaccines, tranScrip has been successfully navigating the seismic changes in the pharmaceutical industry.

“There’s not a chance we’ll go back to where we were before Covid-19, but I’m very excited about what we can do going forward,” she said, referring to everything from regulatory support to drug development timelines, new drug trial structures to remote working and digital applications. Gabbay for one is pleased with this new pace.

  ‘There is going to be a lot of change, society will begin to understand and contribute more to healthcare development. There’s so much to do, now it’s a question of what to prioritise’

tranScrip’s priority is global growth, funded by a recent investment by private equity backer Palatine’s social impact fund. Gabbay can envision 20-30% annual growth in the next few years, more if acquisitions are forthcoming. But she is also president elect of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, and here her priority is to build on the collaboration between pharma, the research community, regulatory and government organisations like the NHS.

Building on solid foundations

Like the coronavirus vaccines – which have been developed so quickly because they are built on the foundations of years of related research – tranScrip’s consultancy in Covid-19 treatment trials is the accumulation of decades of research into respiratory illnesses and treatments. As far back as 1995, Gabbay was involved in the development of a respiratory illness treatment still in use today, and the methodology is currently being expanded for wider use by the NHS in light of the Covid pandemic.

  ‘For over a decade, tranScrip has been working with Synairgen, a company founded by three Southampton University professors, whose viral treatment was one of the first to publish trial results for the treatment of Covid-19, right in the midst of the pandemic last year’

“When Covid hit, it became obvious that the Southampton spin-off drug would be very useful. It could potentially stop people with the virus needing intensive care, and might stop them going into hospital altogether,” Gabbay said.

Synairgen had already planned a trial of the drug for patients with lung conditions but pivoted towards Covid-19 patients when the outbreak hit. While the world watched reports of overstretched ICU wards, exhausted doctors and alarming death statistics, tranScrip worked with Synairgen to set up an initial trial in hospital sites in the UK led by University Hospital in Southampton. The results, published in June, showed the drug significantly reduced the odds of developing severe disease by almost 80%.

Meantime another promising treatment candidate went into a trial and that’s when the game of whack-a-mole started. The team had to find suitable places to run both another trial and the next phase of trials for the Synairgen candidate, places that weren’t overwhelmed by a Covid-19 wave but had enough patients to ensure the results were clinically significant. They managed, and the first international phase III patient was dosed in January. At the same time, tranScrip and the other company neared completion of a phase II trial of an oestrogen-based treatment for Covid-19.

“We had to completely change the way we do trials,” Gabbay said. “Not only that, normally we would go in to verify what’s happening in the trial centres but you can’t go into the hospitals now, so everything has to be done remotely.”

A changing pharma landscape

tranScrip’s team of highly-skilled pharmaceutical and regulatory experts take on complex consultancy projects for big pharma, small pharma, biotech firms and other stakeholders that have emerged as the drug industry has changed. These days the lengthy process of getting a drug to market is far more fragmented. Contract Research Organisations (CROs) outsource the job of clinical trials, and tranScrip book-ends this CRO market, supporting companies on which drugs to pursue and then helping them gain regulatory approval.

tranScrip was already looking for growth investors before the pandemic hit, and completed the Palatine funding round despite the remote challenges of multiple lockdown. Its choice of investor was very deliberate. “We went for a private equity fund that recognised the importance to us of social impact,” Gabbay said.

tranScrip’s work is grounded in making a difference to society, and its approach to environmental, social and governance obligations is a key driver of the business. “While we need to make a profit for our investors, we are also careful not to compromise our commitment to our customers or staff.” tranScrip has been reconsidering its carbon footprint in light of the pandemic lockdowns, and is determined to maintain the equitable corporate culture it has nurtured from the start.

Co-founded by Gabbay and Marcin Mankowski as a partnership, tranScrip has now become a limited company but still operates on a very flat structure. “We set a lot of store by growing people in the organisation. Culture is very important to us, and we don’t want to approach management in an old-fashioned way. It’s been good to have investors who understand good governance and support us to grow the company with this in mind.”

With the investment, Gabbay and her partners want to acquire smaller companies to underpin their regulatory affairs division, and expand geographically to better reflect the work they’re doing already. “Around 80% of the work we consult on is carried out outside of the UK, but 80% of our work is done from here. We will shortly open an office in Switzerland and we want to expand our presence in the US. And while we have an office in Ghana we’d like to move into North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.”

tranScrip will still operate from its home base in the Thames Valley.

‘We deliberately chose the Thames Valley. It was the perfect place to set up the business, as the company has been able to attract and retain people with a very specialised skillset’

The glass ceiling

Gabbay honed her skills in the boardrooms of a big pharma in the 1980s but left when she kept banging up against the glass ceiling. “All my male colleagues went whizzing past me. But actually it turned out to be a good thing because I was never promoted to incompetence,” she said with a wry smile. “Ironically I had a superb grounding for a great career, I just got there a little later”.

tranScrip is her second successful pharma services company, she sold her first in 1996 to PPD, the US drug development CRO that was bought by Thermo Fisher Scientific for $17.4 billion in April.

Coming from a research background before she entered the corporate world, Flic was keenly aware of a dearth of industry standards and acceptable practices for physicians in pharmaceutical development. “Halfway through the 80s, I watched colleagues getting fired every few years, because they had no training in research and development, no standards to work by, and were constantly battling with the commercial part of company who wanted them to do unethical things,” Gabbay said. She helped found the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine (FPM) and has been instrumental in setting global industry standards and developing training programs to establish validation for pharmaceutical physicians in the industry. Later this year she will take on the FPM presidency with a manifesto to focus on women’s health and encourage collaboration between corporate pharmas and the NHS.

A keen sailor, Gabbay has passed up the opportunity to compete in the Fastnet offshore yacht race for the seventh time this year. There’s just so much to do. On top of tranScrip’s global expansion and her Faculty role, Flic wants to expand the company’s charity involvement, particularly in Nepal. “My daughter runs an educational charity in Nepal where 70% of women are illiterate, and I would dearly love to contribute to healthcare there.”

Meanwhile the coronavirus is still devastating many parts of the globe. While vaccine rollouts in developed countries are generating triumphant headlines, they can only attenuate the disease, not eradicate it. “We need both, treatments and vaccines”, said Flic. It’s going to be another very busy year.

Flic Gabbay