Carl Pelzel, President and Chief Executive Officer of Depomed, Inc. (DEPO), talked to the Wall Street Transcript about his company Depomed, Inc. Click here to read the complete interview.
TWST: Depomed is a specialty pharma company that focuses on enhancing pharmaceutical products. But what exactly does that mean?
Mr. Pelzel: What it means is that we are a pharmaceutical company that has a drug delivery technology that’s unique to us, that can be used to develop unique products that have advantages for patients. Now, why is that relevant? Well, there are many pharmaceutical companies that develop brand-new products. For example, they will come out with a new chemical entity and a product that has to go through a lot of toxicology work from the FDA, and they develop the product from the very beginning. And that is very expensive, requires a huge infrastructure and is very risky because you don’t know when you develop such a product what the benefits are going to be. We’re different in that we have a drug delivery technology that takes the existing compounds and makes them better. We feel that model is better for us because we don’t need the huge infrastructure necessary to find new compounds. We don’t take on as much risk associated with the development of our compounds because we’re starting with a known chemical that has been used in humans for many, many years. That means we don’t have as many surprises. The other advantage is that we complete our development programs much faster. So we use this drug delivery platform to make products better, to get them through the FDA and to the market. The advantage is lower cost, lower risk, faster time-to-market and less uncertainty because we’re using compounds that have already been used in man. The downside is that we don’t have as much patent protection as you might with a new chemical entity.
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