Near-fatal bike spill can’t stop Goodman
New company tops a billion in three years
How good is Jonathan Ross Goodman at profiting from the pharmaceutical market’s inefficiencies?
Even as he continues to suffer the effects of extensive brain damage from a near-fatal bicycling accident in 2011, his latest company, Montreal- based Knight Therapeutics Inc., has almost tripled in three years, for a market value of $ 1.35 billion.
Investors have good reason to have faith in the 49- year- old chief executive officer. In 2014, less than three years after the cycling accident left him debilitated for many months, Goodman sold his former company, Paladin Labs, to Endo Health for US$ 2.95 billion. The sale, coupled with his family’s ownership of closely held generic drug maker Pharmascience Inc., vaulted him and three siblings into the ranks of the world’s billionaires, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“During that time my cognition was improving and I realized I didn’t have to be that smart to make money and I could still do it,” Goodman said in a phone interview last month. Though the sector has since cooled, dropping his net worth below US$ 1 billion as the valuations of generic drugmakers like Pharmascience have eased, Goodman sees potential for Knight to be another Paladin.
Perhaps literally: its business model is the same and Goodman even made a standing offer to Endo to buy Paladin back. Endo told him the division isn’t for sale, he said. Endo declined to comment.
TOO SMALL
Goodman makes money by acquiring marketing rights to specialty drugs in countries deemed too small to be worth the trouble for multinational drugmakers. That’s basically every nation outside of the U. S., Europe, Japan and China, he says. Canada, for instance, accounts for two per cent of the global pharma market, according to government statistics. To gain access, drugmakers have to win approval from Health Canada, then get pricing approval from another board and negotiate with each provincial government to determine what each will pay for the drugs. Even for a rubber stamp approval of a drug cleared by the U. S. FDA, reformatting the paperwork to Health Canada’s requirements costs upward of $ 500,000 and takes about six months. Companies then face about two more years to wend through the layers of bureaucracy.
“If Canada was efficient, I wouldn’t exist,” Goodman said.
In 2016, Knight generated US$4.4 million in sales, mostly from selling Movantik, an Astra-Zeneca treatment for opioid- caused constipation, and Impavido, a Paladin-developed treatment for leishmaniasis, a parasitic affliction that causes sores on skin and internal organs.
“Given that most of the company’s products remain at a pre- commercial stage, investors should not read too much into the quarterly results at this time and focus on the firm’s outlook for 2017 and beyond,” wrote Laurentian Bank analyst Joseph Walewicz in a March note. Walewicz sees revenue rising to US$ 6.9 million this year and US$ 52.3 million in 2018 as more drugs work their way through approvals in Canada and other markets such as Israel, Russia, South Africa and the Caribbean.
Knight has another 14 prescription, over- the- counter and diagnostic products in its pipeline, according to a June presentation to investors. The company also has invested in nine life science venture capital funds to gain preferred access to new drug rights. As a result, treatments for issues around diabetes and HPV-associated cancer have been added to Knight’s pipeline, according to the presentation.
“If your time horizon is your grandchildren, you’ll do very well with Knight,” says Goodman.
Goodman grew up in a pharma household. His father, Morris, founded Pharmascience, a Montreal drugmaker now owned by family investment company Joddes, according to a 2016 disclosure in a U. S. patent lawsuit. Joddes is evenly split by Goodman and his three siblings, including David, CEO of Pharmascience, sisters Shawna and Deborah. Paladin was the division of Pharmascience that Jonathan took public in 1995 as a 26- year- old fresh out of graduate school at McGill University in Montreal.
Goodman’s life took a dramatic turn while on a bike ride in August, 2011, with some company managers t hrough t he Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. At one point, Goodman circled back to bring an energy bar to a rider struggling up a summit. After reaching the peak, Goodman was going downhill alone when, for a reason no one knows, he fell off his bike and landed on his helmet. A fiveweek coma followed. Doctors told his wife he had a 90-percent chance of dying. He suffered septic shock, a pulmonary embolism, two heart attacks and partial paralysis. When he finally awoke, he told doctors he was a 32-year old Muslim woman.
Recuperating took a year and three hospitals, where Goodman learned to walk, talk and eat again. His wife and three kids were his reason to push on. “I would have given up. The task was so daunting,” the executive said, his voice calm and sombre. The purpose of his interview with Bloomberg News, he explained, was to inspire others facing similar adversity.
“I’ll never recover,” he said. “Recovery is not the proper term for someone who suffered traumatic brain injury, because my brain will never be what it was.”
Goodman still has trouble swallowing dry foods and he uses his iPhone for constant notes to supplement his poor short-term memory. For sports, there’s ping-pong. No more cycling (despite his email signature that jokes about replying while riding). A concussion would kill him.
When he was well enough to return to Paladin, he decided the time had come to sell the company. Endo, then a New Jersey- based drugmaker, wanted Paladin as a necessary component to reincorporate outside the U. S. as a tax inversion to sidestep U. S. corporate tax rates, says Goodman. Rajiv De Silva, then Endo’s CEO, offered a package worth $142 a share, a 9,300- per- cent return on Paladin shares over their lifetime. Goodman accepted.
Though still suffering the after- effects of the accident, Goodman hadn’t lost his negotiating savvy. As he walked out the door of De Silva’s office, he turned and asked for one more thing, and then another and another. In quick succession he got Endo to agree to let him form Knight as a spinoff to Paladin shareholders and toss in US$ 1million cash. He also retained the rights to Impavido and a priority review voucher the drug earned from the FDA as a reward for developing rare- disease drugs. Knight later sold the voucher to Gilead Sciences Inc. for US$125 million and funded investments into life science funds that are feeding its product pipeline today. De Silva, who was replaced as Endo International PLC CEO in September, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“My mother used to tell me if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” Goodman said.
He’s still asking.