“Formulating for Topical Product Innovations”

A key quality of any inspirational CEO, exemplified by Dr. John M Newsam, is leadership, an ability to articulate the purpose of the company and to ensure that the entire organization is applied effectively towards its realization. Dr. Newsam sets his company’s sights high by emphasizing the importance to patients and sufferers of the company’s efforts. He consistently emphasizes the company’s potential for durable global impact.

Dr. Newsam frequently expounds on the importance of being a true partner to each client. Any research and early development program will provide moments of pleasing progress, yet also times when research does not advance fully according to plan. By applying the best knowledge and skills to issues, irrespective of affiliation, the likelihood of finding practicable and innovative solutions is maximized.

"We help our clients advance their topical and transdermal drug programs all the way from product concept assessment through to first regulatory filing, or with one or more stages in between. Our parent company, Encube Ethicals, is a global leader in topical contract manufacturing services, operating the world’s largest single-site manufacturing site for such products. Together, Tioga Research and Encube Ethicals can support our clients from early formulation product innovation through to full-scale commercial manufacturing."

The details of the formal agreements to which Tioga Research is a party can be a key success factor. Business proceeds through agreements with staff and advisers, providers, stakeholders, and clients. Dr. Newsam clearly enjoys reaching formal agreements. His long experience enables him to negotiate even the fine details of most legal contracts.

Tioga Research is recognized for scientific rigor. Dr. Newsam has global recognition as a scientist which facilitates the company’s interactions with professional scientists, at all levels, in client organizations, with academic collaborators and contacts, and with current and prospective company staff. It is refreshing for a CEO to be engaged in the scientific and technical details of laboratory programs.

Dr. Newsam's early career was dedicated to fundamental and applied materials research, in academia and industry. He was recruited from a senior research role at ExxonMobil Corporate Research into technical and operational leadership at Biosym Technologies in San Diego. His leadership aptitude led to swift promotions to increasingly senior levels of management. He ultimately led a division that included more than 70 Ph.D. employees. He learned from renowned scientific mentors. He also benefited from interactions with C-level executives running many different types of organizations through his engagement in companies and venture capital groups. He acquired his skills under mentoring, by guidance and observation, and, predominantly, through doing. In lectures on entrepreneurship, Dr. Newsam often states that he learns by his mistakes and attributes his current leadership dexterity to a substantial number of mistakes made over the years.

Elements of Dr. Newsam's leadership style build on his own robust personal principles. His emphasis on service, mutual trust, and considering what is in the best interests of each client stems from his early experiences as a fledgling entrepreneur even before attending college at Oxford.

Tioga Research is a contract research and early development organization (“CREDO”), delivering services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and cosmetic companies worldwide. The company is renowned for developing and deploying high throughput experimentation (“HTE”) platforms. These allow the company to screen large tracts of compositional space to discover those formulations that perform optimally in terms of skin deposition, delivery, and permeation. By using these HTE platforms, Tioga Research has amassed extensive databases of formulations performances, as well as an increasingly impressive track record of program successes for clients.

Tioga Research strives to remain abreast of the latest scientific developments, especially of new tools and technologies that might reveal how molecules diffuse into and through the skin, or the mechanisms by which molecules introduced into the skin modulate skin properties or biology. The company launched a weekly ‘Topical Science Talk’ series early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The series has included memorable presentations from leading academic and industrial researchers from across the globe. Tioga Research continues development of HTE screening platforms and research on proprietary ‘Tioga Ready Bases’ (“TRB™”s), base formulations that are each tailored for a particular class of actives. Responding to client requests, the company has recently implemented a dedicated good laboratory practice (“GLP”) capability to complete in vitro release test (“IVRT”) and in vitro permeation test (“IVPT”) studies that can evidence ex vivo the bioequivalence of a generic and an innovator topical product.

The company’s teams are pleased to contribute new scientific or technical insights. An early innovation of the Tioga Research team was the PENNSAID 2% product, used to relieve the pain of osteoarthritis. For several years this has been the top-selling topical prescription drug product in the US. A direct-to-consumer product of Dermala, Inc., for which a US patent (with Tioga Research inventors) issued early in 2022, does a super job of managing acne. The company’s sense of fulfilment is greatest when a topical product developed by the company, such as these, is providing substantial benefit to patients, either in clinical trials or after a regulatory approval. IE