With each new file that lands on his desk, the rule is always the same. “We check that the drug meets an obvious medical need, then we assess whether its development is technically possible in France or in Europe. If we are 85% sure, we go for it”, details Thierry Hoffmann, Managing Director of Laboratoires Delbert. For nine years, this discreet pharmaceutical company, based in Paris, has come to the aid of old essential drugs threatened with extinction. “In nine years, we have brought about fifteen of them back to life. It’s a great success.”he continues proudly.
It all started in 2013, when Thierry Hoffmann, an industrial pharmacist, and Marc Childs, a psychiatrist, broke the bank to buy Delbert laboratories. “During our professional career, we had been shocked to see large pharmaceutical companies abandoning old drugs, which were still very effective and essential for certain patients, because they were no longer sufficiently profitable or because of production difficulties. », says Hoffmann. The duo then set themselves a challenge: to buy these old drugs from Big Pharma in order to give them a second wind.
In the process, the two partners began to draw up a list of products at risk, where they meticulously identified essential drugs that were regularly out of stock or discontinued.
Health sovereignty
In 2014, they embarked on their first rescue by acquiring from the American Abbott Vercyte, a treatment against polycythemia vera (due to which the patient produces too many red blood cells), prescribed when the reference treatment does not work. not, and for which no other solution exists. “The supplier of the raw material had decided to stop production for financial reasons. At the time, 2,000 French patients were treated with this product and risked dying if it disappeared”observes Hoffmann.
The Delbert teams then set about completely redeveloping the product from A to Z, from the synthesis of the active ingredient to the manufacture of the finished product. The task is not easy, because the molecule of Vercyte, pipobroman, is a derivative of combat gas that few manufacturers have the ability to manipulate. To this difficulty is added another constraint that the laboratory imposed on itself when it was launched: to relocate as much as possible the production of drugs on French or European soil to guarantee health sovereignty. Despite everything, the laboratory manages to find an expert in fine chemicals in France, then calls on the manufacturer Delpharm, in Lille, for the production of the finished product.
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