Richmond-based Phlow Corporation is taking on medicine supply shortages in pediatrics through a new coalition with a group of the country's top children's hospitals.
Eric Edwards, president and chief executive officer of Phlow, said Children's Hospital Coalition brings together some of the top pediatric hospitals with a mission to deliver on Phlow's promise of ensuring a reliable supply of quality, affordable essential medicines.
The hope is to eventually have every children's hospital in the country be a part of the coalition, he said.
Phlow, co-founded in early 2020 by Edwards and Frank Grupton, operates on the basis of manufacturing high-quality, essential generic drugs at a low cost, helping to boost the United States’ drug reserve.
In researching the supply needs at pediatric hospitals, Edwards said he learned these hospital have been dealing with a high level of uncertainty surrounding those essential medicines for a long time. Children's hospitals can spend upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars per year trying to manage drug shortages.
"That’s why Phlow has decided to step up as a public benefit corporation pursing that triple bottom line of financial, social and environmental returns to focus on significance in impacting an area that no other manufacturer had been paying attention to," he said.
Edwards said the first steps toward building the coalition began in 2019 when he and others within Phlow took the time to research and learn directly from pediatricians and neonatologists.
"I witnessed the challenges with essential medicine shortages that were specific to these children's hospitals, shortages that can lead to errors, compromise or delay procedures and replace first-line therapies that may not be as safe or efficacious," he said. "Now, Phlow is listening to them, as the experts, to tell us what they want, what they need, and we're getting to work to provide a supply and manufacture those medicines."
Edwards said the company will be able to do this through "transparent cost-plus pricing for coalition members under long-term purchasing agreements."
"That’s why it’s so critical that this coalition grows," he said. "The more we have, the more Phlow will have a level of certainty of how much volume they need. We’ll be able to, in turn, aggregate that volume and start manufacturing more and more meds specific to their needs."
A recent $20 million Series A funding has allowed Phlow to fund the coalition with without any capital investment from the hospitals, Edwards said.