William Looney

Two weeks in and the New Year already seems old. Yet members of our Pharm Exec Editorial Advisory Board are still eager to share their top of line predictions on trends that will shape the industry’s business and reputational assets.

Dominating the frontier of medicines discovery is a simple, endlessly challenging question: if not a drug, then what? Industry science has evolved from the chemical roots of the small molecule to the biologics synthesized from living organisms, but the delivery mechanism – pill or injectable – is basically the same.

The pursuit of excelMedal_4mpix__MG_0199-150x150lence in biopharmaceutical innovation in Russia has never had a sponsor-until now. Prix Galien International, a global network of Nobel laureates in medicines, established its 18th country beachhead in Moscow earlier this year, culminating in a historic first: an October 24 awards dinner to recognize the best in new drug research as well as innovation in biotechnology and pharmaceutical products.

For Patrick Lindsay, providing decision support across the full product life cycle is no stretch goal-it's today's fact of life

Pharm Exec convenes a diverse panel of experts to identify the key markers of common ground: its time, people, and money against that greatest intangible-hope.

New and emerging technologies are noteworthy not simply for the excellent science behind them but also for the way they expose those raw edges of the industry’s business model. In biopharma today, disruptive changes to the model are being driven by two forces.

Big Pharma is quietly stepping up to provide critical supplies of essential medicines, other health equipment, and skilled local personnel to areas of the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan this month. Although industry operations in the Philippines appear largely intact, most companies are working through global humanitarian aid organizations due to the logistical challenges created by the collapse of infrastructure on the ground.

Pharm Exec's two key features this month illustrate the strategic contradiction facing today's industry.

The implosion of the Affordable Care Act’s vaunted healthcare.gov benefit enrollment process has obscured a far more critical issue for Big Pharma: how much leeway do companies have in promoting durable brand affiliations among the potentially millions of new patients with subsidized access to new medicines?

Compliance rules under the US Physician Payments Sunshine Act have been criticized for the excruciating level of detail demanded from individual company submissions.

Our October issue highlights a latent threat to Big Pharma: the behavioral mindset that may be best characterized as "ageing in place."

A key issue for biopharma marketers today is balancing cost and value factors around specialty biologic drugs, particularly those for cancer and other high profile, lifealtering diseases.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

A key issue for biopharma marketers today is balancing cost and value factors around specialty biologic drugs, particularly those for cancer and other high profile, life-altering diseases.

Editorial Director William Looney discusses the five essential characteristics exhibited by the more than 200 men and women selected by Pharmaceutical Executive as Emerging Pharma Leaders

Shire's new CEO has a simple strategy for success: Set the pace on specialty medicines, spread the positive buzz and momentum of a growth stock, and seize the opportunity to innovate.

The trade media is ablaze with lurid accounts of bribery, tax fraud, and other illicit promotional activities in China-ironically, the country touted as guarantor of our industry's future.

Being an observer rather than a participant in the drugs business makes it easier to sense those defining moments when something fundamental has changed, a limit is reached, and a new order emerges to reset the basic license to operate.

Our lead feature this month on 15 new Emerging Pharma Leaders is a window into what makes our publication unique. In 2007, Pharm Exec began a systematic annual search to identify and highlight those men-and women-that in our purely editorial view had real prospects for a future key to the "c suite." Two of our early choices-Sanofi's Chris Viehbacher and Heather Bresch of Mylan-have made it to the very top, as CEO.

That strict red line between regulatory authorization and market reimbursement is blurring pink – at least in Europe.

Getting patients to take their medicine on spec and on time is the challenge that never goes away-it's the deadweight baggage accompanying every industry innovation since the arrival of aspirin a century ago.

At a time when Big Pharma is struggling with new business models geared to the demands of a changing marketplace, the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) is offering a way forward through voluntary licensing and patent deals that it insists will deliver what the drug majors say they want: more innovation; better market access; and the opportunity to demonstrate measurable improvements in public health. Is the MPP, as founding chair Phillipe Douste-Blazy claims, that “new business model for the future?”

What is industry icon Fred Hassan's management formula for staying fresh in an era of market churn?

Pharm Exec recently convened a cross-section of industry experts to review current and pending efforts to turn great science into good oncology practice.

Monday, February 4, is World Cancer Day. Eli Lilly & Co., one of big Pharma’s biggest, has decided to give the moment its due with the launch of a new policy advocacy initiative to ensure that patients actually benefit from the flood of new oncology treatments now emerging from the industry’s research labs.

As companies seek safety from empowered payers, bankrupt governments, and distracted regulators, success will come to those who understand how competition and technology are changing the way everything this industry does.

2013 may be a number associated with the fate of the luckless, but our annual review of the business and policy environment for Big Pharma suggests otherwise-as we near the midway point in the "tween" decade, there is good fortune in store for those with the perspective that comes with the long view.

Hindsight can be a great teacher – but only if you have the self-awareness needed to adapt those learnings to the next business challenge, whose rough edges are by definition almost always “non-recurring.”

Pharm Exec takes a look at how a mid tier player - Denmark's Lundbeck - is counting on the momentum of the big US market to vault it to global leadership position.

Developing a drug is still very much a game of chance: a round puzzle of soft edges, with pieces that rarely fit the hard rectangles of time and money. Solving the puzzle correctly-with a new product as the sum of its parts-depends on making that lengthy progression from basic science to registration as linear as possible.