Pharmaceutical Executive-04-01-2007

Despite efforts to increase diversity, the stark reality is that today's leading pharmaceutical companies are still run by men.

Have the confidence to step outside the norm. A targeted, humorous campaign will attract attention more quickly.

The pharmaceutical industry is abuzz with discussion: What will "tomorrow's" sales force look like? How will the job profile and competencies for sales reps change to better serve customers? How do we recruit and hire this new breed of sales reps? Steve DeMorro, president of Publicis Healthcare Recruiting, identified several key characteristics of the new biopharma representative, and how he believes these will become a standard part of the job profile for recruiting-and developing-sales reps in the future.

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."

The acquisition of Eczacibasi's generic unit gives Zentiva a sales force of more than 500, manufacturing capacity of more than 400 million dosage units per year, and entry into the rapidly growing Turkish pharma market.

If the uk's office of fair trading (OFT) is to be believed, Brits are overpaying for their medicines to the tune of ?500 million a year. That's the conclusion the OFT came to in its long-awaited report on the Pharmaceutical Pricing Regulation Scheme (PPRS), the arcane method by which drug prices are set in the United Kingdom.

Value-based medicine is tremendously helpful if you've got a good drug. It could guide R&D, price decisions, and marketing. But most companies don't have all the clear winners.

And while reporters aren't writing any more about the industry, the topics they cover are a moving target.

The push for new media is on. Pharma agencies are buzzing about social media tools such as blogs, podcasts, and interactive healthcare forums, but few firms really know how to make these online initiatives work.

Phone-based marketing might not offer the wow factor of its newer Web- and text-based cousins; however, proposing that a computer handle calls offers an innovative twist. But this concept begs the question: Who wants to speak with a computer about his health?

Dr. Doug Bierer felt like he was in a courtroom, waiting for the jury to render its verdict. It was June 2002, and executives from Procter & Gamble and its partner AstraZeneca had just finished presenting their bid to FDA's Non-Prescription Drugs Advisory Committee (NDAC) to market the popular heartburn medication, Prilosec (omeprazole), as an over-the-counter (OTC) drug.

There are whistleblowers who bring wrongdoing to light. But there are also whistleblowers whose main complaint is "I should have won." FDA seems to suffer from a serious oversupply of the second sort.

Everyone agrees that by streamlining and downsizing, Big Pharma is taking a step in the right direction. What no one yet knows is if it's too little, too late. Or what "too little, too late" might look like. Or what else might work.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act-or SOX, as it is dubbed (not always so affectionately)-requires companies to provide greater control and quality assurance across a vast spectrum of business processes. In practice, SOX plays out differently industry by industry and even company by company. But for pharma, one of the most pressing consequences is the need to improve the accuracy of revenue recognition.

All the hoopla about Medicare drug prices is overshadowing the real action in pharmaceutical pricing: a less-noticed exercise that aims to reduce reimbursement for medicines purchased by state Medicaid programs. Retail pharmacists say the proposed changes will put them out of business, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) fear an end to discount negotiations.

Ever wonder how all those biotechs, specialty shops, and generics that make up Not Big Pharma ever manage to stay in business? Pharm Exec asked Bill Trombetta of St. Joseph's University to look at their books, analyzing their financial performance with the same metrics he uses for our annual Industry Audit. His findings may surprise you. In fact, when you check the bottom line, you just might consider changing teams.

Inappropriate care may account for 25 to 30 percent of the US healthcare bill. Former NEJM editor Arnold Relman used to write that if we could eliminate the unnecessary care, we could save enough to insure all the uninsured.