People

What The Doctor Ordered

by STEVEN VASS

 

Rabinder Kaur Buttar, Chief Executive of ClinTec International and bright hope of the Scottish pharmaceuticals sector, had a run-in with chancellor Alistair Darling when the two were on a trade mission to her native India last year.

The chancellor was chatting about all the potential he saw for joint ventures between Indian and British hotels and chain store retailers and the like when she cut him off.

"I said, 'Hang on', she says. 'What about clinical research? What about the work that is already happening here?' "

With her Sikh/Punjabi background and Glasgow upbringing, Dr. Buttar has no trouble in cutting to the chase. She is a curious mixture of sweet reticence and sudden bursts of frank insight, which no doubt had the chancellor backpedalling furiously.

India has been an important selling point for Buttar and her company, which does clinical research and medical writing for the pharmaceutical giants in areas such as cancer, rheumatism, asthma and multiple sclerosis.

As one of the first Western clinical research companies to set up in Bangalore around the turn of the decade, ClinTec heavily markets its subcontinental links to would-be client companies in the West. With trialling in Western countries fast running out of appropriately afflicted patients, India's vast population is seen as offering huge potential.

As Bobby Singh Bal, ClinTec's senior corporate development director (and Buttar's youngest brother) explains: "That population has a very wide range of diseases, from malaria to cancer to diabetes, so patient recruitment should be quicker".

In the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry, where the clock on patents starts ticking from the moment they are registered, every delay in trials means more profit-time wasted. The faster that service companies such as ClinTec are at setting things up, the more their reputation will grow.

Although being in India is also about being poised to take advantage of big Indian pharma companies moving from drug copying into developing new medicines, the need for patient access has also taken ClinTec into other emerging trials markets such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In total, the company employs 200 staff in more than 30 countries, and doubled its turnover to about £5 million in the 2007 calendar year, following 60% growth the year before, with net profit margins in both years of "between 10% and 15%".

Current projects include a major asthma trial in numerous countries in the Middle East and another, for ovarian cancer, taking place across Europe.

While it may still be a long way from the research big league to which Buttar aspires, the company certainly appears to be moving in the right direction. The daughter of a Sikh-Scot bus inspector from Bishopbriggs in the north side of Glasgow, Buttar and her brothers and sisters sound like a textbook example of immigrant families grafting to outdo their peers.

While first-born Buttar picked up a degree in biochemistry from Glasgow University and a Ph.D. in immunology from Strathclyde, her siblings include one of Scotland's leading doctors in diabetes, a building and property entrepreneur and Bobby, the youngest at 31, who trained as a management consultant at Deloitte's.

Buttar set up ClinTec in Germany eleven years ago, after years working for pharmaceutical companies including Wyeth and Wellcome (now part of GSK) in sales and research. Having moved to the town of Dinslaken, near Dusseldorf, where her husband was setting up a dental practice, she launched her company after first going into consultancy.

"One cardiology assignment gave me the opportunity to work on a five-year project involving 24 countries and 13,000 patients. I took on clinical research associates, managed them, started the project and realized it was time to register a company", she says.

Having developed ClinTec's reputation over the next few years, she decided two years ago that it was time to either sell up or push for serious growth.

Opting for the latter, she brought in her brother as the company's business strategist and moved the head office to Windsor, expanding along the way from 68 staff to about 100 in 2006 to the current 200.

With an agreement to create 234 jobs in Scotland alone in the next three years after relocating the head office to Glasgow on the back of a £1.3m regional selective assistance grant last November, the logic is that the larger the talent pool, the better equipped the company is to handle the larger, more lucrative research contracts.

This expansion was topped off last October by the opening of what Buttar calls ClinTec's centre of clinical excellence in Munich. This broadens its clinical abilities to what is known in the trade as the full-service offering, bringing in expertise in EU regulation, data management and strengthening medical writing and research expertise.

Together with an international business director and investments in offices elsewhere, plus a track record working with giants like Novartis, Wyeth and Abbot Laboratories, Buttar claims ClinTec now has the infrastructure to become a much more serious player in its field.

"There are very few parts of the world in which we are not present. We believe we will achieve £50m of turnover within five years", she says.

This sounds like the kind of prediction that would have the business dragons on Dragons' Den spluttering into their water glasses, but the company has certainly convinced some powerbrokers of its potential.

The £1.3m grant from Scottish Enterprise was the largest of last year, and the company was described at the time by Lena Wilson, SE chief operating officer, as "very important to the life sciences sector in Scotland".

Having been voted entrepreneur of the year at last November's Scottish Asian Business Awards and shortlisted for the business and commerce excellence award at Lloyds TSB's Northern Jewel awards, which take place in Manchester on Saturday, April 19, 2008, Buttar is now on the cusp of winning investment backing of at least £15m to set up her own research and development company.

Although she will not say what the new company will be called, she believes this project has the potential to far outstrip ClinTec. The new company, which could be worth £100m to £200m within three years, aims to develop compounds that could offer a new means of treating cancers of the colon, children's bones, kidneys and skin.

Then there is America, where the company sees strong potential to expand. It opened an office in Boston last week, which First Minister Alex Salmond took the time to open during his Scotland Week tour. ClinTec wanted an office from which to pitch to the big companies in the northeast U.S.'s so-called Pharma Corridor. It also plans to similarly target the sector's other major hotspots in Philadelphia and California in the months ahead.

With the worldwide market for clinical research forecast to be worth £10  billion by 2010, you clearly have to be in places like Boston to win it. But Buttar does not forget to stop talking money long enough to point to the social importance of her work.

"I have a keen interest in the whole social responsibility area of medicines", she says. "We like to think we are doing something with a real purpose behind it, something which is really meaningful".

 

April 6, 2008

[Courtesy: The Sunday Herald]

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