Get Inspired - Speed, Aggression, Surprise

Capturing maximum value with intellectual property

By Christian Hansen. PHD, MBA, Partner and Co-Founder of Nordic Biotech

When founding ProFound Pharma A/S in the beginning of 1999, I was inspired by the motto of the British commando unit, the Special Air Services (SAS): Speed, Aggression, Surprise. It is the recipe for how a small, agile, and highly efficient unit can strike with great impact at the key positions of much larger forces, and beat the likes of Amgen, Biogen, Chiron or Genentech.

  • ProFound was based on the following observations:
  • Protein-based pharmaceuticals constitute 10% of global drug sales
  • There are several protein-based drugs on the market and under development
  • Most of the important products in the area were developed and patented in the early 1980s and face patent expiry in 2005-2010
  • The problems and desired improvements of 1st generation protein drugs were known, as well as technologies addressing these shortcomings
  • The owners of several major 1st generation products had not efficiently created and patented 2nd generation versions of their products
  • There is (was) an opportunity for creating and patenting these 2nd generation products via a new entity – ProFound.

It goes without saying that the ability to rapidly identify and hire a group of highly talented people in the area was necessary, and fortunately possible. This reality, and the fact that the opportunity could be pursued by others as soon as it became public knowledge, dictated an SAS-like approach to the situation:

  • Speed in conceiving the potential for improvement of important proteins,
  • Aggression by filing a very large number of patent applications for many newly-conceived molecules, and
  • Surprise by not telling anyone of this strategy until it was too late for them to counter-attack.

This turned out to be a fruitful model for creating and capturing value very rapidly, and reaffirmed my basic philosophy concerning patents (also somewhat inspired by armed conflict): shoot first and ask questions later – file now and reduce to practice later.

So what does "file now and reduce to practice later" mean?

Not being an educated patent attorney allows me to simplify the matter a bit, and real patent attorneys might want to furnish more nuances. Nonetheless, patent law hasno requirement for an invention to have been physically reduced to practice, i.e. actually made in the laboratory, but only that the patent application enables "the skilled man" to do so.

Having many creative AND skilled men and women in the organisation, we were able to conceive of thousands of modified proteins with a likely potential of having properties superior to those of 1st generation molecules, and to file, within a year of starting the company, more than 50 patent applications concerning such improvements to most of the important protein-based drugs in the market.

This multi-pronged approach, in turn, reserved a large space for ProFound to operate in while choosing the best few projects to pursue, identifying the best molecules among all of the conceived molecules, and awaiting the publication of competing patent applications for 18 months after our initial filings. It also provided a protective wall around our favourite candidate molecules against other parties´ molecules which offered the same improvements in performance, but which had different structures.

358 days after the foundation, about 9 months after the first experiment had been performed, and before any of our patent applications had been published, the owners of ProFound agreed to sell the company to US-based Maxygen for more than DKK 500 million, demonstrating the forcefulness of a speedy, aggressive and surprising approach to IP in the biotech business.