The pharmaceutical company Gebro Pharma has started a new collaboration strategy with biotech companies to develop new drugs. “In the medium-sized industry we have focused until now on growing with incremental innovation, which has less scientific risk, but which now has a lot of risk of market access in countries like Spain, because the Government is reluctant to give it incremental remuneration,” acknowledges Sergi. Aulinas, general director of the company in Spain, and minority shareholder with a group of directors.
Gebro Pharma is an Austrian family group, owned by the Broschek family, present in Austria, Switzerland and Spain, from where it directs its global business creation strategy and which accounts for almost half of the group’s business. The company had a turnover of 94 million euros in Spain last year, 13% more than in 2021, with an operating profit or Ebitda of 10% and a staff of 150 people, the majority at its headquarters in Barcelona.
Gebro’s challenge in Spain is to exceed one hundred million euros in sales this year. “Pharmaceutical companies have to fill our portfolio with new drugs simply to maintain turnover, because the arrival of generics naturally deteriorates income,” recalls Aulinas. Thus, Gebro has five launches in its portfolio, one for each of the next five years, in the therapeutic areas in which it is strongest such as rheumatoid arthritis, respiratory, urology and hematology.
Aulinas explains that the group’s plans are to invest in the scientific co-development of medicines that are in early phases of research. “We are looking for new high-impact initiatives into which we can inject an important investment package,” she acknowledges.
Gebro already has agreements with biotechnology companies, but of lesser scope. Thus, it has a marketing agreement with the Austrian biotech BIT Pharma for a medicine for cerebral hemorrhage, and another with the Catalan digital health startup HumanITcare, with a project that allows patients with asthma to be monitored at home, collecting data from your breathing capacity and sharing them with your doctor so your treatment can be adjusted.
“Pharmaceutical companies traditionally provided a product. The focus of the future, however, will be different: offering health results, providing the medication and the device to give information to the doctor and to monitor the patient,” he assures. To position itself in this new scenario, the firm participates in Barcelona Tech Health, he recalled.
Gebro also has other R&D projects underway with the Catalan innovative ecosystem. Thus, the company collaborates with the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (Idibaps) in research into glioblastoma, a tumor of the nervous system.
