The Laszlo Letter

Random Thoughts: Sub-prime Leadership

The following is the first entry under this new category of Random Thoughts. These are meant to be short and sweet and hopefully trigger some reaction in your own brain.

I just learned that E. Stanley O’Neal, Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch is leaving that firm following the need to write down $8.4 billion related to the real estate subprime mess. Now, $8.4 billion is a lot of money and someone does need to take responsibility for allowing a debacle of that scale to develop. When the loss is that great, it's appropriate that the top guy turns into the fall guy.

So let's reflect on this but with the perspective turned toward our own Biopharma industry. The nearest example I can think of is the ouster of Peter Dolan as CEO of BMS back in September 2006. Mind you, Mr. Dolan was not exactly volunteering to take responsibilty for his management of the company. Perhaps we would all be better served if some other members of top management recognized their own weaknesses and/or bad leadership and volunteered for the exit rather than being shown the door.

Bedside Portable Computer

Motion Computing has announced the availability of their Motion C5 Mobile Clinical Assistant (MCA) tablet computer. This flash demo gives a good overview of the device.

The device was created in collaboration with Intel Digital Health Group. While currently intended for hopital use, the tablet could be used for other purposes such as EDC.

It should be noted that the device is primarily a hardware solution and does not come with healthcare application software. A good example of the way the device can be adapted for bedside use is described in this field study by Intel. In this case, the tablet was integrated with the Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager platform.

The unit uses the Intel Centrino processor, runs on either MS Vista or XP and includes a bar code reader, RFID reader and digital camera. It also supports wireless and bluetooth connectivity.

Sharepoint in Life Sciences - A Learning Opportunity

You've seen posts here about the use of MS Sharepoint as either a replacement for or complement to Documentum for content management. I have also talked about the Life Sciences focused FCG and NextDocs products based on Sharepoint.

Now you have the opportunity to learn more about the use of Sharepoint in Life Sciences via a seminar sponsored by FCG and Microsoft called "A Change in Paradigm - SharePoint Trends in Life Sciences."

This meeting will be on November 8th in Princeton, NJ. You can get the details and sign up here.

Note that the meeting is not focused on the FCG product but on SharePoint in general within Life Sciences. You will hear speakers from Centocor, Biogen-Idec and Pfizer. There will also be exhibits from companies that you may not have heard of including ARX, Brimstone, Intrasphere, K2, Knowledge Lake, Leverent Consulting, Tzunami and Xinnovation.

I'm certainly interested and intend to be there.

Biopharma: The Next 10 Years

Every so often my colleagues in the Consulting world get the urge to gaze into the crystal ball and wax poetic about what our industry must do to survive and prosper in the future. Typically you get these reports from firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Accenture, McKinsey & Co. and IBM. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see one from British Telecom (BT), not a name that one normally thinks about in the Life Sciences space.

Click on the illustration to see a larger version. Illustration taken from the BT report and is the Copyright of British Telecom.

Pfizer: Irrational EXUBERAnce

The other shoe has dropped!

Pfizer has decided to stop selling Exubera, it's highly self-touted inhalable insulin product. As you have read here before, Exubera may be a technical breakthrough but it's also one without a proven benefit to the consumer. For whatever reason, management at both Nektar (the developer of the inhaler) and Pfizer got too enamored about the technology and chose to put their head in the sand about market demand and acceptance for such a product.

The consequences are devastating for both companies financially and highly damaging to their reputations as both researchers and marketers. On the financial front, Pfizer is taking a $2.8 billion pretax writedown. This, in light of blockbuster sales projections of $2 billion per year and an actual performance of just $12 million.

Update: The Information Week 500

On October 1st, I wrote a piece about the19th Annual Information Week 500 list. At that time, I told you that I would try to get more information about the pharma/biotech companies that made the list.

Lisa Smith, an editor at Information Week, sent me the copy of the entire report and a brief explanatory note with it.

The gist of her note was that they do not release the ranking of the companies above 250. I'm guessing that when you get past the first 100 to 200 the ranking algorithm can't hold up too well. In other words, there are too many variables to deal with when deciding whether a company should be ranked 300 or 400. It's called splitting hairs.

Next, Lisa noted that she also could not release any company-specific data related to new or ongoing initiatives. I guess this makes sense since companies would be less likely to participate in the rankings race if their intellectual property was not protected.

So, I am unable to give you any more information for the reasons why the following companies made the list.

BD Biosciences

Beckman Coulter

Eli Lilly

Genzyme

GSK

Merck

Pfizer

Roche Diagnostics

Schering Plough

Solvay

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Wyeth

But, there are a few additional insights that I'd like to share with you from the report.

Read on...

Of CDR, CDMS and EDC

Once in a while it's nice if someone else is doing the writing.

So, here is a link to a two-part article primarily about clinical data repositories (CDR) by Mark Uehling of ClinPage. We spent several hours discussing CDRs, CDMS's and EDC systems by phone. Mark then distilled our conversation down to this two part article. Please don't hesitate to give us feedback either on the ClinPage site or here.

Forget the prints. Publish a book instead!

Once in a while I like to tell you about something that I find fun, refreshing and useful in my personal life. My Canon XTi digital camera is one of those and you have heard my views on that in the past. Now comes something with a huge WOW factor, the BLURB web site.

Imagine a piece of software that is fun to use and allows you to create a professional (really!) published book that can rival something you would normally buy at Barnes & Noble. I set out to find something like this and actually found it!

Read on...

Biopharm IT Leaders - The Infoweek 500

The 19th Annual Information Week 500 list has been published.

Here, we will only concentrate on the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies that made the list.

As the publication states, "to be ranked, companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue are asked to complete a qualifying application that examines business technology strategies. The application contains a quantitative section on technology initiatives and priorities, and a qualitative section of essay questions. The responses to these two sections are evaluated, weighted, and combined into a total score to rank the companies."

The following Biotech and Pharma companies made the list:

• BD Biosciences
• Beckman Coulter
• Eli Lilly
• Genzyme
• GSK
• Merck
• Pfizer
• Roche Diagnostics
• Schering Plough
• Solvay
• Thermo Fisher Scientific
• Wyeth

Of these, only three made it into the top 250 list. These are:

• Eli Lilly - #50
• Wyeth - #59
• Roche Diagnostics - #231

Read on to learn a bit more...