The story of how Juan Ramón Alaix was groomed for his CEO role and how Zoetis turned into the world’s largest publicly traded animal health company.
After the House of Representatives passed The American Health Care Act — the bill that would replace Obamacare — by a razor-thin margin, consideration moved to the Senate, where Republicans have only two votes to spare to secure passage.
Now is the time to develop a novel financial instrument which will provide risk transfer, transparency, and more certainty. A futures market in healthcare is a product whose time has come.
Because drug R&D is likely to remain difficult even as technology advances, the challenge for you, as a leader, is this: How do you maintain the motivation of talented researchers, young and old, when progress is slow?
A life science ecosystem is taking root in New York City that in 10 years’ time could vie with Boston and San Francisco as measured by the number of jobs and startups, funding resources, or high science ideas.
Academia and biotech have long been sources of innovation for the pharmaceutical industry, and this is increasingly important for Big Pharmas that want to prop up flagging pipelines or boost particular areas of focus.
Read all the exclusive content — including who our CRO award winners are this year — in the 2017 CRO Leadership Awards Special Edition.
Starting on Nov. 27, 2017, pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to begin marking all saleable units and homogeneous cases of prescription drugs with a unique serial identification code (product identifier), as stipulated by the Drug Supply Chain Security Act. Many drug makers have been preparing for this so-called “serialization” deadline for years by implementing new processes and systems in their internal operations, or by ensuring efficient transfer of serialization data from their contract manufacturing/packaging partners. However, some manufacturers — in particular, smaller or virtual firms — are now engaged in a mad scramble to meet all the requirements of the deadline.
According to the 2016 California Workforce Trends in the Life Science Industry, there were 16,000 statewide life science job postings during the calendar year; 2,732 of those jobs related to clinical trials. In 2015, over 85 percent of life science positions required a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. Hiring managers expect the strong demand for talent to continue until 2018.
Prior to the passage of the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, a meager 38 orphan drugs were approved, corresponding to an approved drug for less than 1 percent of an estimated 7,000 orphan diseases.
“Capacity” for outsourcing development and manufacturing has mostly been defined by a strict calculation of how much material a facility (or facilities) can output over a period of time. Executives from companies like MedImmune and Merck tell us why, unfortunately, that definition doesn’t work anymore.
Trade tariffs can significantly impact the cost of importing and exporting investigational products and ancillary supplies for clinical trials. As such, it is important that companies consider harmonized tariff classification to ensure no money is left on the table.
In the July 2017, Life Science Leader magazine we will be publishing the article — Balancing Biopharma’s Bright Future Against Its Tarnished Image — 6 Retired CEOs Share Insights For Today’s Industry Leaders. The story features six former CEOs: Mike Bonney (Cubist); Hank McKinnell, Ph.D., (Pfizer); Francois Nader, M.D., (NPS Pharmaceuticals); David Pyott (Allergan); Stephen Sherwin, M.D., (Cell Genesys); and Henri Termeer (Genzyme). As each of these executive was gracious enough to give us an hour of their time, we encountered a slight problem — too many great insights to be included within all the pages of a print publication.
When Zoetis, the former animal health business unit of Pfizer, was spun off as an independent company via an IPO in February 2013 (see Life Science Leader’s June 2017 cover feature), overnight it became the world’s largest publically traded animal health company. And while no longer part of one of the largest human health companies in the world, this doesn’t mean that a company focused on developing products just for animals isn’t interested in collaborating with biopharmas dedicated to creating therapeutics for people. Scott Brown, D.V.M., Ph.D., is the executive responsible for brokering such collaborations. The VP of external innovation elaborates on some of the challenges faced by Zoetis post IPO in creating research collaborations, as well as why human-health oriented companies might want to consider collaborating with an animal–health-focused company like Zoetis.
More thoughts and comments from cancer immunotherapy experts augment our 2017 immuno-oncology update.
Drug Sales Reel Amid Probe Into Charities. This was the headline of Jonathan Rockoff’s June 12, 2017, Wall Street Journal article that points out how sales for two U.S. “blockbuster prostate-cancer drugs” (i.e., J&J’s Zytiga and Pfizer’s Xtandi) were down (i.e., 14 and 11 percent respectively) for the first quarter from a year previous. Apparently there are two contributing factors that explain this drop in sales — a charitable-giving federal investigation, and how the companies have responded to patients in need.
As we get closer to one of our industry’s biggest annual gatherings, the BIO International 2017 Convention in San Diego, June 19 – 22, I have begun to pin down my schedule for which educational sessions I plan to attend. For me, this has always been a challenge, as BIO has so much great educational content. And with many of the educational sessions overlapping, I find I have to pick and choose where I want to be, often with at least two options from which to pick.
