‘We are on a new path and it is a good path’

LEO Pharma is a pharmaceutical company focusing on therapies for the treatment of skin diseases as i.e. psoriasis, eczema, acne, skin infections and rare skin diseases. The company was founded 112 years ago and have been in skin diseases for more than 60 years. CSR.dk talked to the company’s director for global sustainability, France Bourgouin to understand how they work on sustainability.

Seen through a sustainability lens, what kind of company is Leo Pharma?
We are a company that is rapidly maturing its sustainability practice. A new CEO joined the company in the summer of 2019, setting the company on an ambitious growth path, looking to improve the standard of care for dermatology patients and address unmet medical needs through innovation.

The company’s approach to sustainability is following this new direction – it is a personal commitment from the CEO, it is fundamental to her leadership to grow the business responsibly, but also to work towards having sustainability as an integrated part of the strategy, and our executive team is committed to taking sustainability to a new level, including on issues of health and access and quality of life.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are on a new path and a good path.

What are your three biggest sustainability challenges?
The main sustainability issue for a pharmaceutical company is access. The sector in general has worked hard on this in the past couple of decades. Initially this was largely focused on infectious diseases and the world’s least developed countries, and often based on donations, but that has changed. The sector is looking at access as an issue to be addressed in all markets – be it looking at vulnerable groups or including patient perspectives along the full value chain (from R&D, to trials etc-). The inclusion of patient voice has been a great step forward in the sector.

LEO Pharma has a role and a responsibility to work within the health ecosystem to find ways to help more people get access to our medicines in the markets in which we operate. For example, we believe that dermatological patients often face barriers to access the right treatment including lack of awareness amongst healthcare providers, slower uptake of innovative solutions, lack of treatment guidelines, or treatment protocols that require patients first to try out treatments even when such treatments are unlikely to meet their health needs, most often because they are less expensive.

Another set of challenges on our portfolio is related to using digital solutions to provide health services. In that respect we have to be highly aware of issues of privacy, ethics, and equality in access to new services.

Finally, the Covid pandemic and the present situation brings to the fore the importance of the issue of health in society – issues of access and equality, and the challenges within health systems to meet all the needs of its population. It is a challenge. What are the medium- and long-term implications of this phase? How will chronic, non-communicable diseases be prioritized?

We also continue to develop and improve our efforts among the other sustainability disciplines such as responsible supply chains, climate change – and not least diversity and inclusion which is high on our agenda.

How has your sustainability work changed over the past 3-5 years?
LEO Pharma has set a new direction for sustainability by taking a strategic approach – by this I mean looking at sustainability through the lens of our core business to identify where it is that we can leverage our core assets to bring value to our business and to society.

That means our corporate sustainability strategy is designed to leverage business assets and capabilities for creating long term value to society and our company. For us, that means looking at where we can support the health agenda, because:  

• Health is our business, and ensuring healthy lives is a challenge facing society.
• Improving health outcomes is our greatest impact on society and supports the growth of our business.
• Improving health outcomes requires more than effective drugs; it requires partnering with the full eco-system to address material issues such as access, barriers to healthcare, patient voice.
• Issues of environmental, social and ethical performance are seen as foundational as ‘responsible operations’ or ‘how we do business’ – and as enabler for delivering ‘health’ value to society.
• Our approach to sustainability is consistent with this wider business trend of focusing on how we contribute positive impact (our purpose) while managing discrete negative impacts (integrity and respect).

What are your main achievements also over the past 3-5 years?
Getting a sustainability strategy that is aligned with our corporate growth strategy required a lot of effort and collaboration, not least because we were setting our course to meet the needs of the company as it was and is moving in a new direction.

While we are still working on setting targets for health and our key strategic pillars, we did manage to set a science-based target aligned with 1.5C. This was announced on what we call “LEO Pharma Day” on Dec 3rd this year to celebrate with employees. Climate change is a topic that is important to our employees and what we do in sustainability matters to them. Being able to increase the visibility of our work, through the strategy and through setting targets has been an important step.

Which framework conditions or other external barriers would have to change/be removed if Leo Pharma were to take its sustainability work as far as possible?
This is a somewhat difficult questions as the pharmaceutical sector is so highly regulated and should remain so. But as all other companies, we and our sustainability work will benefit from the regulatory environment and investments in relevant infrastructure evolving to fit the development trends and needs of digitization and circularity in packaging and devices among other things.

I also look forward to more clarity evolving on the full ESG spectrum. The social element appears due for an update from focusing mostly on work and workforce development and to some degree supply chain management. We are by no means done with such issues, not at all. But other aspects of human rights and an evolving field of discussing and measuring societal contributions beyond tax and job creation are becoming more prominent, and both regulators, standard setters, companies and the sustainability profession itself will be working to carve out and frame this field in a way that clarifies expectations and best practice.