April 24, 2012
Kevin Sharer is the outgoing Chairman and CEO of Amgen. He serves on the Board of 3M, Northrup Grumman and the California Institute for Technology. He is a Naval Academy graduate and generally regarded as a strong leader and very smart guy. While opinions are mixed about his success as CEO of Amgen, he is [...]
Read the full article →
April 23, 2012
Humira, a rheumatoid arthritis drug from Abbott Labs, will be the world’s top-selling medicine this year, with sales predicted to hit $9.3 billion. Humira is a biologic, which reiterates the need for Big Pharma to embrace the development of biopharmaceuticals in their evolution from the traditional chemical-based drug model. It was also recently approved in [...]
Read the full article →
April 20, 2012
The Supreme Court has been a docket full of life sciences during their ongoing session. Perhaps never in the court’s history has it faced so many cases and decisions related to our industry. In the past month, the court has heard issues related to Obamacare, personalized medicine and gene patents. This week, the issue before [...]
Read the full article →
April 18, 2012
San Diego-based Illumina has slayed the dragon in successfully battling back a $6.2 billion hostile takeover bid from Roche. Shareholders voted to re-elect all of Illumina’s incumbent directors at the company’s annual meeting by a large margin, defeating an effort by Roche to gain control of the board. Following that outcome, Roche announced that it [...]
Read the full article →
April 17, 2012
As we’ve detailed this month, two of the most compelling story lines in the sciences industry are playing out in the southern California sun. In medical devices, Roche continues its pursuit of Illumina, having raised its earlier bid for the company and taken the argument directly to shareholders. And Roche’s CEO is throwing jabs at [...]
Read the full article →
April 16, 2012
We’ve all learned the lesson: Roche gets what it wants. If you don’t believe, ask the former decision makers at Ventana Medical Systems and Genentech, now both loyal divisions within the Roche corporate matrix. The newest target is Illumina, which has been frustratingly stubborn in its attempts to thwart a Roche takeover. Roche tried a [...]
Read the full article →
April 13, 2012
John Lechleiter, CEO of Lilly, today becomes chairman of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s leading trade group. He succeeds Chris Viehbacker from Sanofi in the role, regularly rotated amongst the leading CEO’s in Big Pharma. As part of his appointment, Lechleiter has been on a media frenzy in the past day or two, both print and [...]
Read the full article →
April 12, 2012
Hollywood has used the life sciences industry for inspiration over and over and over again in the past few years. The marketing firm behind the new Three Stooges movie has gotten creative, using a spoof of all those pharmaceutical TV ads as a theme for its most recent commercial. Stoogesta is apparently a chronic condition, [...]
Read the full article →
April 10, 2012
To be held in Boston in the first days of October, AdvaMed 2012 has released its call for company presentations. Last year, more than sixty (60) innovative companies gave presentations to 200-plus venture capitalists, angel and private equity investors, bankers and senior medical technology business development executives. If you’ve not yet been to AdvaMed, it [...]
Read the full article →
April 10, 2012
It happens all the time. A CEO succession plan pits two or more senior executives against one another with one winner and the others likely leaving the company for competing CEO offers. There was a lengthy and well-publicized succession planning saga upon the retirement of Jack Welch from GE. The race was between James McNerny, [...]
Read the full article →
|
