Teva Pharmaceutical Industries has appointed Richard Francis, former CEO of Sandoz, the generics and biosimilars business of Novartis, and current CEO of Purespring Therapeutics and Forcefield Therapeutics, as Teva’s President and CEO, effective January 1, 2023. Francis will succeed Kåre Schultz, currently Teva’s CEO, who will retire, effective December 31, 2022. 

Francis is an Operating Partner at Syncona, which focuses on founding, building and funding healthcare companies and the CEO of two Syncona’s portfolio companies: Purespring Therapeutics, a London-based gene-therapy company, and Forcefield Therapeutics, a London-based bio/pharmaceutical company focused on cardiovascular disease. Prior to that, he spent  five years as CEO of Sandoz and a member of the Novartis Executive Team. Prior to his role at Sandoz, he was a senior executive at Biogen for 13 years, where he held several senior roles, including leading the US business.  

Schultz has been Teva’s CEO since 2017 and he came on board to lead a major restructuring plan, which was announced in late 2017. The plan addressed declining revenue from its generics business, large debt caused by its $40.5-billion acquisition of Allergan’s generics business in 2016, and declining revenue from its number one specialty innovator product at the time, Copaxone (glatiramer acetate) for treating multiple sclerosis, which faced its own generic-drug competition. Schultz was hired to turn the company around. He has  overseen the company’s restructuring and developed the ensuing strategy of further diversifying in innovator drugs and optimizing the company’s generics portfolio by rationalizing the company’s generics product portfolio and moving it away from less profitable areas to more value-added products, such as complex generics, biosimilars, and other products with a higher barrier to market entry. 

Source: Teva Pharmaceutical Industries