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The first biomarker-driven clinical research organization has done more than expand in the last few years, it caught the eye of one of the largest investment firms in the world.
In 2020, Blackstone spent $2.3 billion to acquire Precision Medicine Group (PMG). PMG was founded in 2012 with the idea of improving the process of bringing new drugs and therapies to market. Blackstone’s long-running interest in life science companies took a special focus on PMG due to its aim of reducing the time to market for drug development.
“We had actually been following Precision Medicine Group for a while prior to the acquisition,” Julia Kahr, a senior managing director at Blackstone who worked on the deal, told Blackstone.com. “We saw how the company was growing from its origins as a much smaller business, and it was clear that PMG was squarely focused on an area of major interest to us.”
Anushka Sunder, another managing director at Blackstone, explained that the investment reflected on companies driving innovation in life sciences. Her team always looks for disruptive transformation across the R&D landscape and recognized PMG as a high-quality platform with significant growth potential.
PMG has acquired strategic technological capabilities of its own lately with the purchase of gene therapy support and development company Project Farma in 2021. Project Farma’s focus on cell and gene therapy gives PMG an enhanced edge in the growing field, from the actual therapies to support development to commercialization.
“Since 2013, Precision has supported over 70 percent of the FDA-approved cell and gene therapies and is now even better positioned to support the hundreds of therapeutic new entrants coming to market,” PMG CEO Mark Clein said in a statement. “With our acquisition of Project Farma, Precision is the only life-science services company with true end-to-end capabilities in cell and gene therapy.”
The Project Farma acquisition follows on the heels of PMG’s 2018 dual acquisitions of interpretation and communication of medical science organization Ethos and marketing healthcare agency Big Pink.
While all signs are positive at PMG, the significant expansion of the company’s footprint undoubtedly provides an interesting challenge for its HR leaders. Fortunately, PMG is led by Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt, blockchain expert, and master of streamlining HR operations Kelly Timpane. The senior vice president of human resources joined PMG in 2018 after numerous HR director roles in government contracting, tech, and, now, life science organizations.
Timpane received the “Executive Management Award” from SmartCEO magazine and the Game Changer award from Workforce Management in 2012. Since coming to PMG, she streamlined the HR operations processes, enhancing the employee experience across the PMG organization, including its multiple subsidiary companies.
When Timpane joined just a few years ago, PMG employees numbered at 950; today, they are over 3,000. The SVP has handled this expansion without significantly growing her team, and the lean HR organization currently is working toward a shared service center to reduce decentralization across the company, while also increasing cost flexibility for support services.
As PMG drives forward its own growth and evolution plans, HR will continue to aid that development with one of the industry’s finest shepherding new PMG outgrowths and arms.
