Click here for Part I & Part II

Improving individuals’ quality of life through non-drug dietary products

Rob Crim is the CEO of VAYA Pharma, a division of Enzymotec. VAYA Pharma is dedicated to helping individuals affected by lipid imbalances through the development of proprietary, non-drug dietary approaches. Lipids, a molecular group that encompasses fats and fat-soluble vitamins, play an important role in a number of the body’s natural processes, and lipid imbalance has been associated with disorders such as ADHD and memory impairment. VAYA Pharma seeks to help individuals manage these disorders with three nutrition-based products: Vayarin^®, Vayarol^®, and Vayacog^®. The company recently moved its U.S. offices from Greenville, SC, to Baltimore, where it became a member of the Maryland/Israel Development Center (MIDC), a nonprofit organization promoting trade and investment between Maryland and Israeli businesses and research institutions. VAYA Pharma’s parent company Enzymotec, based in Israel, is one of the world’s leading providers of lipid-based products and solutions. For more information, visit enzymotec.com.

Q. How does the VAYA Pharma product line differ from other interventions targeting the same conditions?

ROB CRIM: I think VAYA Pharma fulfills a real need out there that’s different than pharma. Pharma, because of the way they develop their molecules and the way their molecules work within your body, they often have a lot of side effects, at least in our disease states. They’re very debilitating to the patient and often to even the family structure. For instance, the ADHD drugs do not work for 24 hours so there are comedowns—doctors will talk about it, patients will talk about it. Using nutrition, we treat that same condition in a different way. It’s a different method of action but also it has a different side effect profile. We work over time—which has some downsides—and we don’t work as fast, necessarily, as a pharmaceutical stimulant, but we do work over time so we eliminate a lot of the side effects. We’re on trend, I think, with how people are increasingly thinking about their health care. You want to take care of your health for the long term, and you want to do it in a way that’s natural for your body or comfortable with your body or fits with your body. A lot of people do not necessarily want to put something that’s foreign and not naturally found in the body or the food stream in their body. So, we do it in a way that’s very comfortable for people and kind of on trend. And, often, we find we are great acceptance because of that. People would much rather try a medical food or something that’s regulated as a medical food before they would try pharmaceutical product.

Q. Do you need a prescription to buy these products?

A. You have to have a prescription to get a VAYA product, just like a pharmaceutical. However, we do find, because of the way we’re made and the ingredients that are used in our product, that there are groups of people who might be more interested in natural foods or natural things that would be interested in our products as well. We find we can often target doctors who might take a more holistic or natural approach. We’ll often find that those are some of the early adopters to our product, because of the way our product works and their patient population is interested in it. But we’re a medical product sold by prescription, so we’re not the kind of product you would find at a Whole Foods or anything like that.

Q. How did you gravitate to the medical food space?

A. I ended up in the medical industry for two reasons. One: I do enjoy building a business. I enjoy the marketing aspect of building a business, because you’re really getting people connected, understanding a need and understanding that there is something to fulfill that need. So one is that, but the second thing is I really like to do things that actually help people out. Maybe that’s an overused term, but I do think when you get up in the morning it gives you that little extra bit to get out of bed and know that what you’re selling or the business your building is doing something good for people. I gravitated from selling laundry detergents and Crisco shortening to taking those skill sets that I learned there to selling medical foods, which adds that element of doing something good for people as well.

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

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