“We could do like Putin; you sit down there and I sit here,” jokes Tim Walbert as we enter the boardroom at Horizon Therapeutics’s new start-of-the-art offices on Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green. The table, set up to seat 30 people, would certainly have satisfied the increasingly paranoid Russian leader but we settle to cluster at one end.
Horizon’s new offices are certainly a statement by a company that expects to be a global player in making drugs for rare diseases over the next decade.
It is a subject close to Walbert’s heart. He was in college in the US when he first started feeling the effects of what turned out to be a rare autoimmune disease. It took 10 years and visits to more than 100 doctors before he finally got an accurate diagnosis.
Walbert, Horizon’s CEO, has spent the last 19 years on a drug called Humira, which he helped develop and commercialise in a previous role at the drugmaker now called Abbvie. His younger son has the same condition.
But that wasn’t where Horizon started. When Walbert joined as founding chief executive in 2008, Horizon was focused on inflammatory conditions. Then a private company, it grew largely by acquisition, picking up drugs that had a lower profile and modest sales of less than $200 million, and then growing revenues with strong marketing campaigns.
“Inflammation was opportunistic to take advantage of the market and create a business,” Walbert recalls. “Then, when you have a cash flow, you can do more of what you want to do.”
“We had four inflammation drugs. One we acquired while we were a private company, one we developed and then two we acquired – Vimovo and Pensaid – after we went public in 2011. That allowed is to generate the business. We did well in that environment and used that cash flow to expand and diversify into areas we really liked.”
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