Joanna Breitstein

From her start as a physician working in apartheid-era South Africa to the dramatic turnaround and takeover of Millennium, Deborah Dunsire has lived a life that has defied all expectations.

Amgen's salvation just may be denosumab. We sit down to talk with the head scientists driving the drug.

In our first ever Emerging Leadership Awards, we profile 45 talented young professionals who will lead pharma into the next generation

Here's the saga of how market research, health outcomes, and dozens of other tools that connect the industry to patients came to be.

Industry insiders explain how pharma companies are reorganizing their salesforces in the wake of industry-wide layoffs

Science is the lifeblood of pharma, of course. But these days, science isn't just what you produce in your own labs. It's what you can license, buy, partner on, or gain through acquisition. Which means that, increasingly, deals are the lifeblood of pharma.

Top pharma brand experts discuss today's issues: safety, compliance, corporate branding, combatting generics, and more.

Photos from the awards ceremony of the first US Prix Galien, September 25, 2007 in New York City.

You have to admit: Mark McClellan, MD, has quite a resumé. But after you've been the commissioner of FDA and the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), what comes next?

The Schering-Plough story offers a fascinating tale of a turnaround. But it's also a story of how a leader can right the ship of the beleaguered modern-day pharma company. Given the challenges the industry faces, models of effective leadership are precious. Who can today's execs learn from? To some extent or other, many leaders need to set themselves to the task of studying, emulating, and being a leader like Fred Hassan.

It was like the end of the arms race last November when Pfizer announced it was slashing its national sales force by 20 percent. Coolly downplayed as cost-cutting by new CEO Jeffrey Kindler, the stunning move was met by industry insiders, Wall Street analysts, and the media with one humongous collective sigh of relief. Big Pharma was seen as having grown dangerously addicted to the detailing game over the past decade, with the top firms plowing more and more of their blockbuster profits into trying to keep up with Pfizer's "flood the zone" strategy and with less and less to show for it.

When Meryl Zausner was 25 and working at Colgate Palmolive, she had the kind of moment so many women in business have. She was attending a planning meeting for a laundry detergent product-the only woman in the room-when a thought occurred to her. "I asked, 'Excuse me, have any of you ever done a load of laundry?'" Zausner recalls. "It turned out that not one of them had, and yet here they were, deciding on the global strategy for how women are going to do laundry."

Peter Rost, former Pfizer executive turned whistleblower, isn't just at war with his old employer. He's crusading against all of pharma, an industry he likens to the mob.

When novartis had a look at its recent M&A activity, it found something unsettling: 70 percent of the deals it had done between 1996 and 2004 hadn't delivered their expected value to shareholders. Many other Big Pharmas are saddled with the same problem: The traditional pharmaceutical business model, by which prescription drug makers scoop up assets or companies similar to their own, is going nowhere fast.

Isr?l makov has adventure in his blood. A fourth-generation Isr?li, he speaks proudly of his great grandmother, who bought and sold wool in Russia until the late 1890s when, at the age of 50, she moved to Palestine, bought a piece of land, and helped found a town in the wilderness. It was the kind of career move that Makov, CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals, admires and emulates. As a boy, he rode a donkey to work in his father's orchards on the land his great grandmother bought. He attended an agricultural boarding school, started his career in citrus exports and-decades before Teva recruited him-managed Abic, the second-largest pharma company in Isr?l, and founded Interpharm, the country's first biotech company.

It's busy at merck these days- and not just in the Vioxx legal department. Instead, the entire office buzzes with activity: Executives work late hours, finalizing the regulatory submission; conference calls echo throughout the Whitehouse Station compound, dialed in to local affiliates around the world. In other offices, scientists write up scientific papers, while communications execs buzz in on intercoms, patching the flood of media calls to top scientists.

Just how traditional marriages join a couple together from a common culture, Daiichi and Sankyo are merging based on a sense of having come from the same place, and facing the same future. But the art of integration lies in creating new ways of working that make the marriage bigger than the sum of its parts. Officiating the marriage is John Alexander, MD, head of pharma development for Daiichi Sankyo.

So-called "consumer-driven" health insurance is designed to help informed consumers make better decisions about their medical treatment. But the high deductibles associated with these plans are affecting the end goal.

Understanding how drugs are bought and paid for has always been a bit complicated. People used to say that pharma had two customers-physicians and patients. Only one of them used the drug, and neither of them knew the price. My, how times have changed. Now the industry has so many customers, it needs to stop and get to know them all over again. And that's at a time when drugs worth tens of billions of dollars are going off patent. To map pharma's shifting landscape, Pharm Exec convened a group of top market researchers to discuss the issues shaping an evolving industry. Topics ranged far and wide, from the advent of Medicare Part D, to the new focus on adherence, the role of international markets, even the brave new world of marketing to seniors' children.

Companies don't have the budget, but are being forced to do more active surveillance.

In The Small, Dusty, District Hospital In Temeke, Tanzania, head nurse Sarah Wilson Ochogo is carrying out her morning ritual. She drags a table outside the hospital's tuberculosis (TB) unit, sets out big, white, plastic bottles of pills, and opens a pencil-lined ledger that tracks her patients, their drugs, and their doses. By seven, more than 100 patients are lining up. They place their green patient cards under a stone near the table, and sit down on wooden benches to wait until Ochogo calls their name, gives them their medication, and watches while they take it. By a bit after nine, the patients are off to their daily routines-drawing water, tending crops, or just getting by the way people always have in Africa. And all of them, with luck, are one more day closer to curing their TB.

BMS' use of investigational toxicology puts it in good stead with FDA, which, under its Critical Path initiative, is pushing for more complete toxicology packages.

When Jim Dougherty joined Mcgraw-Hill almost 30 years ago, medical journal publishing was just plain different than it is today. The days of the "three-martini lunch" were slowly coming to an end. Yet many companies still determined their ad schedules based on relationships. There was also less competition: without DTC or the Internet, journals garnered larger percentages of pharma's marketing mix. Today, Dougherty is group vice president of McGraw-Hill Healthcare Information and president of the Association of Medical Publications (AMP), an organization of publishing firms in the medical field. Like many of his peers, Dougherty has witnessed-and continues to witness-the transformation of the field. The future is bright, he says, but most certainly uncertain.

A review of the best ads of 2004--and the people that created them.

I realized that, as president of a pharmaceutical company, I am now a representative of the entire industry. As such, my toughest challenge is listening to and seeing the kind of scrutiny our industry is taking.

There's no better use of healthcare marketing dollars than to reach patients with unmet needs. That's why niche marketing has gained steam during the last few years. But increasing competition in accessing doctors who treat culturally and racially diverse patient groups means pharma marketers have to refine their definition of what constitutes a niche market in the first place. In doing so, they may stumble over a market that has not yet been saturated—US prisoners.

Junction 11 Advertising continued its winning streak with direct messages and haunting images that have become characteristic of the Risperdal campaign.

Orchestra conductors may, at first, seem like an unlikely comparison for pharma marketers. After all, a conductor's job is to ensure that each instrument harmonizes with others within the section; that all the sections complement one another; and that the timing, tone, and pitch of each disparate part are flawlessly executed. But when one appreciates the challenges facing executives today in integrating all components into the marketing mix, the analogy seems appropriate.

Think back: When did you first hear the phrase metabolic syndrome? When did it start to become part of your business and its plans?

Pharmaceutical Executive challenges 21 experts to grapple with the future of the healthcare system.