Karin Conde-Knape, Senior Vice President of Global Drug Discovery at Novo Nordisk, about NLSDays Grand Opening interviewed by Helena Strigård Powering up Through Partnerships” is the theme of NLSDays 2022. The concept is an obvious choice for all companies in our industry. And at Novo Nordisk, you’ve talked a lot about learning from entrepreneurs and startups. You’ve also been open about the fact that partnering for Novo Nordisk hasn’t always been easy, that there has been a journey. Can you talk more about this – where have these partnering challenges been and where the journey is taking Novo Nordisk now? In the past, Novo Nordisk external outreach activities were mainly focused on research collaborations or collaborations around technical platforms. Over the last 4 years, this has changed significantly. As we move into areas adjacent to our core (diabetes/obesity), we have decided that it is not through (internal) organic growth that we will be successful and that external partnerships are required. We have been on a journey to understand the external landscape beyond our core areas, understanding the market and being willing to take more risk. All of these elements have played a key role in bringing to successful execution some of the recent acquisitions for CVD assets (Corvidia and Prothena ATTR), as well as technology platforms (Dicerna). This also has provided us the opportunity to become better partners to our collaborators and also to learn how we do integrations and secure the value of our partnered assets and technology platforms. I anticipate that we will continue in the journey of learnings as we continue to seek out additional opportunities to collaborate in all our disease areas of interest (diabetes, obesity, CVD, CKD, Nash, rare diseases). The Novo name carries a lot of weight and the various Novo arms fund academic and industry developments across our Nordic countries, which helps generate a continuous, healthy seeding and growth of new opportunities. In 2022, for the first time, the Novo Foundation opened for all Nordic countries to participate in their Distinguished Innovator grant, which was a sign to many that the entire Nordic regions has finally received a stamp of validation. Now, it is important to differentiate the entities. And Novo Nordisk is the pharma company – with its own strategies and needs, and yet an equally important, valuable role with almost 100 years of contributing history. Can you tell us how you view Novo Nordisk’s role in the Nordic ecosystem and what does the pharma company hope to see, access, or partner in this region? Within Novo Nordisk, we have the ambition to change the way diseases are treated. Within our core areas of diabetes and obesity, we have special interest to incentivise the academic and biotech ecosystem to allow some of those innovative concepts mature and hopefully become better treatments for patients in need. In this context, the Nordic region could play an important role. We are seeking to work with academics or biotechs that have an interest in tackling unmet needs in disease as well as an entrepreneurial mindset. This includes understanding better what are drivers of disease, what kind of subpopulations can be addressed, and what kind of technology is relevant to do so. We are looking for addressing the patient as a whole and, therefore, are more open to being disease agnostic, understanding that the same patient can be living with obesity and suffer from many of the comorbidities such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. On the other hand, we are also therapeutic modality agnostic, which allow us to pursue the best biology with the best technology. At the same time it is important to say that for us to be able to identify the right patients, we are also in need of the right biomarker tools, so access to human data sets and biobanks may also be required. Rare diseases is also an area where we are expanding our efforts, continuing with our commitment for patients with hemophilia, as well as those with growth hormone alterations. We are expanding further into additional rare blood and endocrine disorders. We are looking to partner in gene therapy and gene editing, with the potential to apply this technology to monogenic as well as polygenic diseases. Large industry can help to “lead the charge” so-to-speak, by being vocal about needed changes and calls-to-action for the rest of the industry. What would be some of your calls to action for our Nordic region: for governments, investors, and/or entrepreneurs? And what is the greatest call to action for Novo Nordisk? At the core of what Novo Nordisk does is to care for patients suffering from diabetes/obesity. Despite the availability of successful treatments, the reality is that patients continue to progress in their disease. Therefore, this means that there is still a significant medical unmet need. The level of investment in this area has decreased significantly over the last years and this has led to decrease number of entrepreneurs venturing in this space. The call to action is to increase the level of investment in the science behind understanding the drivers of the residual risk in diabetes, as well as what is behind the body weight set point. Focus on identification of the sub-patient populations where benefit could be better and which would drive down the size of the clinical trials to be able to demonstrate benefit. By understanding better the molecular phenotypes behind these diseases and in the right populations, we can focus the effort behind biology that could offer better treatments to halt disease progression and therefore reduce the comorbidities in these patients. Thank you so much Karin and see you in Malmö! Grand Opening 28 September 2022 Power-up through partnerships - How level playing fields create a push for growth