It was the fall of 2016 when I began pursuing the idea for this month’s cover feature: Interview a group of former CEOs to gain their perspectives on our industry’s extremely bright future balanced with its currently tarnished image. What advice might these mentors have for today’s current industry executives on drug pricing, corporate culture creation, and so much more? But on Friday, May 12, 2017, the project turned bittersweet as one of the participants, Henri Termeer (71), died after collapsing in his home in Marblehead, MA.

As usual, the BIO International 2017 Convention was a top-shelf event. This year’s show theme was, “breakthroughs.” And while I didn’t see a single breakthrough therapeutic take center stage at this year’s event, there were still a significant number of them worth noting. For example, in the first can’t-miss session listed in my pre-BIO blog, attendance nearly broke through the walls — literally. Not only was this session standing room only, it was the first time I experienced a non-keynote/non-super session have to utilize an overflow room so attendees could watch via live video.

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.

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.

If you follow the U.S. stock markets, then you will probably agree that they tend to be a bit over-reactionary. For example, in February, Under Armour, which had reported 26 straight quarters of 20 percent revenue growth, reported fourth quarter earnings of just 12 percent.

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.

On April 25, 2017, I posted a blog asking the question, Who Is The Biopharmaceutical CEO Of The Year. In the blog, I included a link to a short survey. Our goal was twofold: see if there was enough interest in continuing to pursue such an award, and generate an initial list of names that would be in contention. Thus far, 10 names have been submitted via dozens of submissions, but it’s too early for us to make any decisions or conclusions based on such a small amount of data.  

Alan Dunton, M.D., joined Purdue Pharma as the SVP of R&D back in November 2015. An executive with over 33 years of discovery and development experience, he has been responsible for the approval of more than 20 prescription and OTC products. But now he faces a new challenge. Purdue Pharma is a company whose name has become synonymous with pain management.

In 2012, Pfizer announced a big decision — It was spinning off its $4 billion animal health business. Life Science Leader will explore the difficult task of such an undertaking in our June 2017 issue. And while the article, How Pfizer And Zoetis Launched One Of The Most Successful Spinoffs — Ever, discusses a lot of the important business decisions that were made, one thing not covered in great detail was the opportunity for Zoetis to build a corporate culture of its own.