Life Sciences Insight

2007 was the year that pharma fell in love with biologics, but as the saying goes, you can't love someone else before you love yourself. 2009 was the year pharma fell in love with itself.

The major consolidation started in January, with Pfizer announcing its acquisition of Wyeth. Merck announced its nuptials with Schering-Plough a few months later.

Life science companies face significant challenges around the sales and marketing environment, as OIG regulations, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, the new PhRMA code, and state-by-state mandates quickly reshape operating guidelines. In response, some companies are evaluating enhanced CRM,/SFA solutions to increase their sales and marketing capabilities and promotional competitiveness.

Ten DNA-sequenced volunteers are posting this most private information online, unprotected. You'll recognize some of them by reputation, if not their DNA: pioneering technologist Esther Dyson, and high-ranking individuals from the tech/biotech industries and academia.

The life science industry continues to move forward as it tries desperately to fill expected loss of revenue from drug blockbusters over the next several years. Major M&A between mega pharmaceutical companies promises to restore profitability through increased operational efficiency, although this approach can only hope to maintain a somewhat proportionate rate of return at a lower combined revenue level. Acquisitions of smaller biotechnology companies are a higher risk bet on the success of drugs in the pipeline, paid for at a premium that is likely to only get higher moving forward. In all cases, the prolonged development and approval process guarantee that bets made today will not pay off for at least a few years at best and never, at worst. Are we in desperate times in the industry or simply moving from one business model to the next?

Scientists have reconstructed the biological history of two types of cancer in a genetic tour de force that promises to transform medical treatment of the disease.

The feat, a world first, lays bare every genetic mutation the patients have acquired over their lifetimes that eventually caused healthy cells in their bodies to turn into tumours.

The Washington Post weighs in today with a detailed look at the surge of new research work that is going into epigenetics, a field that has already spawned a string of new biotechs and promises to deliver many more.

Last week the FDA held a hearing to begin a dialogue with the American public on the question of what level of online engagement is acceptable for healthcare companies to have with their customers. In other words, should the FDA make sure Merck's tweets are accurate?

From his outsider's vantage point, computer scientist Stephen Wong sees a big problem with drug discovery. It's too costly and too slow.

And it's getting slower.

When President Obama's $19 billion electronic health records initiative was announced in February, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Paul Grabscheid, vice president of strategic planning of Intersystems Corp. said the company planned to hire 100 workers as a direct result of the economic stimulus funds. Today, the company has met that promise, and then some - adding between 150 and 200 workers by the end of this year, to its initial 800-person team.

Buried in the giant health care bills in Congress is a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Silicon Valley's biotechnology and venture capital industries, sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat.

Sermo, provider of the nation's largest online community of doctors, has had a tough year in getting financial services firms to pay for access to its physician network and has decided to shift its strategy more toward serving drug and medical devices manufacturers, CEO Daniel Palestrant tells Xconomy. The change comes amid talk of layoffs circulating at Cambridge, MA-based Sermo, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Taking the open concept a step further is the Bioinformatics Organization, an open source practitioner that uses wiki software to let researchers post their models, questions, experiments and discoveries.

Pharmaceutical sales and marketing has become increasingly challenging over the last several years for a number of reasons. Rising patient loads resulting from the aging baby boomer generation have overloaded doctors, leaving little to no time for physicians to see pharmaceutical sales representatives. The average interaction time between a physician and sales rep is now less than 30 seconds in primary care settings. Industry regulations have gotten much stricter as well, creating numerous obstacles for pharma manufacturers.

By his own admission, BioTeam co-founder and technology director Chris Dagdigian is a cynical sort, dedicated to the productive use of IT resources, focused on results and cost-and pathologically averse to marketing spin. That makes his positive reception to cloud computing all the more compelling. Just don't call it "cloud computing."

Despite the enormous appeal of cloud computing, making practical use of resources such as Amazon's EC2 is not straightforward. One key issue is scheduling. Jason Stowe, the founder and CEO of Cycle Computing, says that his firm's service, the CycleCloud, attempts to solve a very straightforward problem: "Amazon allows you to provision 1000 servers. Now what?... How do you make it so the submission you just did 5 minutes ago starts running sooner than the submission yesterday, because its higher priority?"

With one segment of British society fearful of the potential side effects of a new swine flu vaccine and another large group shrugging off the pandemic as much ado about nothing, more than half of the island's population is saying no to the shot. And it's not solely a British phenomenon. A new poll from CNN/Opinion Research reveals that 55 percent of American adults will shun the vaccine.

When we last checked in on RFID adoption back in January 2009, evaluations and adoption rates had still been increasing, continuing a 24 month trend of increasing interest in the technology. While adoption rates were still far from widespread, and nowhere near mainstream levels that many had predicted would occur during the early part of this decade, upward trends were still progressing. Approximately 43% of companies were assessing the technology (doubling from just 21% of companies conducting evaluations a year earlier during the beginning of 2008).

Novartis' announcement earlier this week that it is snapping up an 85 percent interest in China's Zhejiang Tianyuan Bio-Pharmaceutical Company underscores Big Pharma's appetite for a big slice of the growing worldwide market for vaccines. As the Wall Street Journal notes, this is just the most recent in a string of such deals, which includes Sanofi's move last summer to acquire Shantha Biotechnics, a big player in India and the rest of the developing world.

A new report by Gartner, Inc., recommends that information technology and service providers plan their 2010 marketing campaigns, sales and service engagements with clearer value propositions aimed at the chief financial officer and strategic business unit leaders.

As IBM prepares to unveil a mashup service and the latest edition of its Mashup Center software, Pfizer is revealing more about its use of the IT-staff-relieving, business-unit empowering technology.