https://youtu.be/dUha4UZciZo
Leonard Mazur is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Citius Pharma, a late-stage biopharma company focused on the development and commercialization of first-in-class critical care products. We discuss the benefits of investing in your professional relationships, investment opportunities in biopharma, and ways to minimize the risks of your investments.
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Invest in Relationships with Leonard Mazur
Our guest is Leonard Mazur, our co-founder, chairman and CEO of Citius Pharma, a late stage biopharma company with a pipeline of anti-infective drugs in cancer care, oncology and stem cell therapy. Leonard, welcome to the show.
It's a pleasure to be here and I thank you for giving me this opportunity to be interviewed by you. Thank you.
Well, that's a mutual thank you as well. So let's start, Leonard, with your journey becoming, I mean, you have a long story of an entrepreneur, but how do you end up in this sector, the biopharma business and running a company looking for a cure for cancer?
So how far back do you want me to go? It all depends. Put it in a nutshell. My journey began because I joined and became part of the pharmaceutical industry a long time ago. I absolutely love this industry. I think this is one of the few industries where you can be involved, not only on the business side, but also you're on the life-saving side. That has its own rewards. And I think a lot of the people that I interact with in this business have that, share that same feeling. And I think that's a real critical part to what we all do. And because of that, I've always taken a deep interest, a deep commitment. I am at, you know, biopharma and pharmaceuticals flow in my veins. That's what I, that's my blood.
All right. So, getting here, just like everybody else's journey, you know, you start out in the beginning at a much lower level. And that's when you really begin to, it's really when you really begin to appreciate what this industry is all about because I started out in pharmaceutical sales and ultimately interacting with doctors and so forth taught me really right on the firing line what this business is all about.
And then ultimately progressing into marketing and then progressing into strategic planning, more acquisitions. So I was fortunate in that I had a great foundation that was given to me by the very first company that I joined. It was called Cooper Laboratories. That company, I spent 10 years there. Had an incredible CEO founder by the name of Parker G. Montgomery, and he was a dynamo. He made 150 acquisitions. So you can imagine what that environment was like. So it was a great environment to be in. The company gave you every opportunity to prove yourself, and if you did prove yourself, you were appropriately rewarded. So I had some really, really great exposure at an early age to deal making, to running a unit of the company.
I managed to even set up a whole little small group called Cooper Dermatology that focused in on a dermatologist. We had Aveeno as our cornerstone grant back then. So all of those were great opportunities for me in terms of my career and what I was able to build upon. I really built upon that platform and what I learned at Cooper Laboratories. It was really a great starting point for me.
That's awesome. So, Leonard, we talked about, you know, all the experiences you had, well, not all of them, but some of the experiences you had, and that you evolved your own process, your own blueprint, so to say, to make a research-based product successful. Could you share with our audience what that is and what that looks like?
So, the research side of this business is a very complex side, and it has somebody that's really, and I always like to tell everyone, someone that's really your partner when you're a company and that is the Food and Drug Administration. So you have to be very cognizant of that because all the rules, all the regulations, all the methods that are deployed by this indust...