Iona Everson (IE): You’ve held roles across a range of therapy areas over more than 20 years at Boehringer Ingelheim. Can you tell me more about what led you to your current position?
Ulrike Graefe-Mody (UGM): I think the story of my career path has three main chapters that took me along the value chain of drug development from bench to bedside. I was trained as a clinical scientist in clinical pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and that was also my entry level position in pharma.
I was then fortunate to see two of my assets in a new indication move from early to late clinical stages, through submission and launches, to become blockbusters. That is a rare opportunity for drug developers to actually witness and it was a tremendous learning experience for me. During that period, I moved into this new therapy area as the head of early clinical development and then led the medical leads across several indications. That gave me the opportunity to apply the learnings that I took from those two assets to earlier stages of development. My key task was to set up clinical teams and programmes in areas that were new to Boehringer Ingelheim, and also to me, such as metabolism-associated liver diseases, obesity and eye diseases. I worked closely with my colleagues from marketing and commercial to develop strategies for these new areas and that brought me closer to the value side of the business, which I really started to enjoy.
I then enrolled in an executive MBA at Mannheim Business School in Germany, which was an excellent complement to the work I did in my daily job and allowed me to have a better understanding of what I was planning to do next.
The third chapter was when the eye diseases team developed so successfully that Boehringer Ingelheim decided to separate it into a new therapy area. I had the opportunity to lead this across functions and this has been my role over the past five years.
IE: Can you tell me more about what you’ve learned about growing and leading a team in a pipeline therapy area?
UGM: I would be nothing without my high-performing, cross-functional leadership team. Having the right mix of people is absolutely key to me. If you think of a business unit in the three phases of ‘build, grow and maintain’, we were certainly in the ‘build’ phase over the past few years and are now slowly moving into the ‘grow’ phase.
People also have different work preferences, so I was actively looking for those who enjoy building new organisations and who are used to acting with speed and a high level of accountability. I think, depending on the business you are leading, you might be looking for different types of people who you want to add to your leadership team.
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