Genfit’s Jean-François Mouney speaks about responding to high unmet medical needs in inflammatory and metabolic related diseases. With the increase in obesity related diseases, Mouney discusses their lead pipeline product: Elafibranor, the new orphan blockbuster drug aimed at curing NASH; nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and other related diseases.   As an entrepreneur with a background in economics, what prompted you to move to the biopharmaceutcal industry and create Genfit in 1999? I founded companies focused on fostering innovation. Most of them have been very successful. The first companies I managed were in the field of high performance composite materials dedicated to aeronautics, space, and armaments. I founded a variety of different biopharma companies and signed agreements with many large international pharmaceutical companies. In 1993 I founded the Eurasanté cluster which is now the third largest health cluster in France.. At the time, there was a huge increase in the number of biotech companies emerging in Europe. This was something that had emerged as a major trend in the early 80s in the United States. After the boom of the biotech industry in Europe, we decided to involve ourselves further in the development of biotech companies such as Genfit that were focused on drug discovery. Genfit was incubated for two years at Eurasanté and, in 1999, I left Eurasanté to become CEO of Genfit. How has Genfit differentiated itself in comparison to other French biotech companies? The first day Genfit was incorporated; we attracted four multinational pharma companies – Sanofi-Aventis, Merck and UCB Pharma - and signed long-term agreements of partnership with them before the inception of the company itself. On that same day, we hired thirty people to start help launch the company and ordered construction of our facilities. We decided to finance the company with our own revenues instead of working with venture capitalists. Genfit quickly became a very successful and profitable biotech company with more than EUR 100 million in revenue in the first seven years alone. I attributed this success to my initial intuition that the trend of partnerships between biotech and pharma companies was a key change in the future of the pharmaceutical revenue model. After the “revolution of the genome, we knew technology would be diffused to pharma and biotechnical companies like Genfit and decided to begin to create our own compounds and drugs because of this. Today, Genfit has a large pipeline of drugs. One of them is in phase-3 and will be entering the market in 2020.

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