Eversana fills out its management team with more industry leaders

Eversana, the year-old aggregation of service providers to the pharma industry that has been brought together by two private-equity companies, has announced new additions to its leadership: Tim Guttman, former CFO at AmerisoureBergen, will join Eversana as CFO; Greg Skalicky, formerly chief commercial officer at inVentiv Health, will be Chief Revenue Officer; and Mark MacNaughton, formerly with Cardinal Health, will join as CIO.

The three join Jim Lang, CEO, who was formerly CEO of Decision Resources Group, and Mark Therier, chairman, former CEO of OptumRx. Over the past 18 months, JLL Partners and Water Street have made numerous acquisitions which are now brought together under the Eversana banner: Dohmen Life Science Services, Triplefin, The Access Group, Health Strategies Group, Alliance Life Sciences, The Patient Experience Project and, most recently, Seeker Health.

When Lang joined the company, he summarized its goals thus: ““Together, we offer integrated solutions to the life science industry that address the shift to value-based, patient-centered care and deliver long-term sustainable value for payers, providers, channel partners, and patients.” The company is offering services for critical rare, orphan, and complex specialty therapies by providing management and regulatory strategy, marketing agencies, outsourced distribution, patient engagement and support, pharamacovigilance, medical communication, and safety, as well as research, global pricing software and analytics. “We’ve bridged the gap between science and sales to bring forward-looking commercial thinking to the world of innovation, as well as scientific excellence throughout the product lifecycle.”

That’s an interesting stance; obviously, Eversana’s backers have decided that commercialization services for life sciences are a business with a future. In broad strokes, Eversana is a conglomerate of service providers comparable to others that have been combined in recent years, such as IQVIA, Syneos Health or Precision for Value, with the exception that those have substantial assets in clinical research. (There are some clinical research/drug discovery assets that were part of Dohmen Life Sciences [itself a rollup of various companies years ago], but they would seem to be a minor part of the overall organization.)

The ability not only to provide advice and market research to life sciences commercial teams, but also to supplement them with patient-support or boots-on-the-ground sales support, follows through on the concept of having life sciences focused on drug discovery and development, and handing off the rest to these service providers. How broadly life sciences companies will hew to that, in this era of intense pressure on pricing, outcomes and marketing practices, remains to be seen.