BoB@JPM: Ron Cooper, enGene

Welcome back to the business of biotech, JPMorgan Healthcare Conference edition. I'm your host, Ben Comer, chief editor at Life Science Leader. And today, I'm speaking with Ron Cooper, CEO and board member at Ingene, a clinical stage nonviral genetics medicine company with a lead gene therapy candidate that aims to delay or prevent bladder removal for people with non muscle invasive bladder cancer. Ron is an accomplished globe trotting pharma and biotech executive who spent nearly thirty years at Bristol Myers Squibb before joining Albireo Pharma as CEO in 2015, a company he transformed from a small discovery and research organization to a publicly traded global commercial biopharma, which was acquired by Ipsen for up to $1,200,000,000 in 2023. Ron is also a member of several biopharma company boards, and I'm thrilled to speak with him today about how to grow, scale, and transition life science companies from small research driven organizations to global enterprises. Ron, thank you so much for being here. I know it's a busy week. You know, thanks very much for the opportunity. Great to see you, Ben. Yeah. Great to meet you in person finally. I just mentioned that you spent almost thirty years at BMS, in increasingly senior roles, in Canada and The US, across a bunch of European countries, including The Netherlands, The UK, and France. You were BMS's European president, prior to your departure in 2014. What are some of the, lessons that that you learned working across different geographies, and cultures for one of the largest biopharma companies? Well, I was really blessed to have really a full career at Bristol Myers Squibb. You know, I would call that my scale experience, right? When you work in, in, in a company where you manage billions of dollars and you and you manage billions of dollars of expenses and thousands of individuals, you really learn about scale. So my in my experience with BMS, as you said, you know, I worked across five different countries, probably close to 20 different therapeutic areas over over the years, launched dozens and dozens of products. Right? And I think, you know, the theme that kinda goes through all of these things, that in working with the different countries, different therapeutic areas, and the like, if you continue to focus on the patient, right, and the benefit that we are trying to bring to patients. And then you then think about the team and the effectiveness of the team and recognizing particularly that in different countries and cultures that that individuals have deep insights into into their local businesses. If you treat those individuals like adults, you put those things together, you land up, with magic. And I think in my time at Bristol Myers Squibb, we had opportunities where we delivered a tremendous amount of, top line growth, tremendous amount of efficiency in earnings per share, but at the same time made an impact in a lot of patients around the world. Yeah. And …