An Entrepreneur Takes On Pills and Passionate People

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Considering the fact that he is a pharmacist by trade, pills bother Bertrand Bolduc an awful lot.

He acknowledges that they are a necessary part of solving many important health problems, but when patients wind up taking several a day, other problems can emerge. They forget which ones they have taken, and can easily wind up taking too many or too few to be effective. Even worse, the mere fact of taking so many pills convinces many people that they are sick.

"People — especially elderly people — define themselves by how many pills a day they take," he says. "That's very harmful for people, at least psychologically. They think if it's 10 pills a day, they must be very sick. It might not be; it's probably just three different drugs. But the perception is that they are sick."

As the President and CEO of Montreal-based Mistral Pharma Inc., Bolduc is in a position to change that perception. The firm is premised on a set of drug delivery technologies that can dramatically reduce the number of pills an individual must take. Instead, one specially designed pill can tailor the release rate of pharmaceutical agents within the body, even providing "pulses" of medicine at key intervals.

The approach appeals to Bolduc's desire to see pharmaceutical innovations that offer solutions, rather than more challenges.
"It's to try and make it simple, and to get the product to adapt to people as much as possible, and not the opposite," he says.

That perspective might serve as an anthem for Bolduc’s career, which has been premised on driving innovation by bringing people together. He has done just that for Mistral, which was spun off from the work of a GlaxoSmithKline researcher in 2000, but which remained a paper enterprise until he came on board three years later.

Bolduc subsequently led the company into strategic business and research partnerships, as well as seeing it listed on the TSX Venture exchange in April 2005.
His accomplishments have earned him the respect and praise of his colleagues within the industry, along with honours such as the New Generation Entrepreneurship Award from Réseau HEC, the Montreal business school's prestigious alumni network. Meanwhile, he has also served as the former president of the Pharmaceutical Marketing Club of Quebec, and is currently the president of BIOQuebec, the influential industry association made up of 250 members.

It has hardly been the isolated life of the pharmacist, a field in which people are taught to be self-reliant and make decisions independently. Bolduc discovered a very different path even as he was studying for such an occupation.

While he was a student at the University of Montreal, he took up an internship sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada (now Rx&D). The opportunity took him to Nordic Labs, which eventually became part of sanofi-aventis, where a mentor introduced him to all facets of the industry, including the marketing and distribution of drugs.

"That's where I understood that by teaming up with all sorts of other people, you could do so much more," he recalls. "I was trained to work in a pharmacy alone. Now I was discovering that in a company you could work with all kinds of people, and that was very exciting to me. That's why I chose to go into industry."

By the early 1990s, Bolduc realized he was not destined for life either at a lab bench or a dispensary counter. He went into marketing with Servier Canada, where he initiated projects like a recipe book for diabetes patients, which was subsequently translated into languages like Punjabi in order to reach as diverse an audience as possible. The popularity of the book took it through several printings, reinforcing his growing conviction that the work of pharmaceutical science does not stop until you have helped as many people as possible, "not just to sell pills, but surround the product with services and tools to make people view that product better and help them with their disease."

Such lessons continued throughout the late 1990s, when he spent four years with Axcan Pharma, helping their annual revenues move from $15 million to $120 million. He took part in the company’s acquisition of the US firm Scandipharm, which called for more than $100 million in interim financing, as well as negotiating the acquisition of the key drug Photofrin® from QLT, a $60 million deal.

If those numbers sound daunting, they were not so Axcan founder Léon Gosselin. "He had a flair, a tolerance for risk that was incredible," Bolduc recalls of his former boss and mentor.

That experience also left Bolduc eager to keep the idea of risk in the right context. Rather than regarding it as something simply to be feared and minimized, he came to appreciate risk as something to be understood and managed carefully. Besides ensuring that you have fallback strategies for unpleasant outcomes to any project, he argues that approaching a project too timidly can be riskier than committing aggressively to it.

"When you put $20 million into a company, you’re taking a $20 million risk," he explains, noting that the company may need more than that to succeed. "If you put in $30 million, you might be taking less risk, because there’s more chance that everything will go through."

Similarly, Bolduc draws a crucial distinction between setbacks and failure. The former are common, but no matter how serious they might be, they are not the same as the latter. He points to the recent example of Ambrilia Biopharma, which has faced many serious challenges on the way to developing its lead HIV/AIDS drug. Nevertheless, in mid-October the company licensed this product to multinational giant Merck & Co. for US$17 million cash, plus another US$ 215 million as the drug makes its way into the market.
Falling down from time to time is not the problem, he insists. "Failure is to stay down." Which is also why he regards success, like happiness, as being a journey rather than a destination.

"In every job, there are what I call the three F's: the faith in the project, the fun getting there, and the finance," says Bolduc. "Passionate people never leave because of the last F, they always leave because of the first or second one. Money is a means, not an end; and it's a consequence, if you do things right."

Finding and keeping those passionate people should be another priority for any entrepreneur, he adds. He refers to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who wrote that good people hire those who are as good as they are, if not better, while less talented people take on employees who are even less talented.

Bolduc agrees: "You don't have to be afraid to hire 'A' people all the time, if you want to have an 'A' company or an 'A' team."

And he has had precisely this ambition for Mistral, remaining always on the lookout for those passionate participants.

"We have a much stronger board than the company justifies at the present time," he says. "The people who are there are much stronger than we would probably need at this time. But if we want to become something much bigger, we need those people now, not later. And we've got to convince those people that they're going to be part of an exciting venture, and that the company's going to become what you think it's going to become."