L.J. Sellers

Lifecycle management and line extensions helped the Percocet franchise generate steady annual growth, rising from $40 million in 1997 sales to $214 million in 2003, despite the fact that it had no patent protection.

Synta is in a very unusual position: Two Big Pharmas have paved the way with proteins, while the small biotech follows with a pill.

We had a vision that this project deserved a company with a focus on HDL as the next frontier in the cardiovascular area.

Nektar?the drug delivery firm formerly know as Inhale?has been around for 14 years, but its pace during the last few has been dizzying. In 2001, the company made two major acquisitions that not only expanded its technology base from inhaled therapeutics to a broad range of exciting new technologies, but also gave it revenue from five products on the US market that use its technology and lined-up another four in Phase III. In 2002, Nektar brokered 11 collaborative partnerships, and in 2003, it generated $106 million in sales.

The genomics revolution may not have ushered in the age of personalized medicine the way healthcare experts predicted, but innovative diagnostics keep pushing the industry toward the ideal of the "right drug for the right person at the right time. "One company that exemplifies that model is CeMines, a Colorado-based enterprise with an impressive, noninvasive cancer diagnostic in development. The product, which uses molecular fingerprinting to test blood samples, has had a 100 percent accuracy rate for every trial conducted. It not only determines-even in early stages-if a patient has cancer, but provides guidance for which type of treatment will work best.

In PE's December Pipeline Report, an unexpected Phase III candidate rose to the top. The drug: BioMarin's Aryplase. The reason for its success: an amazing turnaround job by chairman and CEO Fred Price. But Aryplase is not Price's first accomplishment at BioMarin, which was spun off from Glyko BioMedical in 1997. It is, in fact, only one of many that resulted from Price's efforts to jump-start a stalled company.

When your father is Sidney Pestka, "the father of interferon," it's hard to grow up without learning something about the potent little protein that helps regulate the immune system. "I was surrounded by science my entire life," says his son Rob Pestka. "I worked in his laboratory. I published a paper together with him. " And so it seems only natural that one day Rob would become CEO of PBL Therapeutics.

Before Botox became a popular beauty treatment, Allergan was just a small ophthalmic business that made prescription eye therapies and contact lens care products.

Check out the ranking of the world's largest pharma companies in the fourth annual Pharm Exec 50.

The number-one item on doctors and patients' wish list? A better pain medication-one that isn't addictive, doesn't cause gastrointestinal problems, and targets the source rather than receptors in the brain.

Don't expect us to launch products in the magnitude of a billion dollars in sales. For us, a product is very interesting at $200 or $300 million."

For everyone from legislators to healthcare payers to corporate executives, generics is the new hot topic. First, the Greater Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act of 2002, which would eliminate the 30-month delay that is triggered when a brand-name company sues a generics maker for patent infringement, passed the US Senate and is under consideration in the House.

In a new twist on "direct mail campaigns," marketers at Eli Lilly have taken DTC to an unprecedented level. The company is currently under investigation by the Florida attorney general for allegedly mailing Prozac Weekly (fluoxetine) to a woman who did not have, or request, a prescription for the product.

Much has been said recently about how the blockbuster model can no longer sustain innovation and growth in the pharma industry. Hans-Joachim Lohrisch, CEO of German-based Altana Pharma AG, and George Cole, president of Altana Inc., its US subsidiary, beg to differ.

When Pfizer gets in on a good thing, it isn't content to share. Two years ago the company initiated a semi-hostile takeover of Warner-Lambert to acquire full marketing rights to the hot-selling cholesterol treatment, Lipitor.

After three successive blows, Wall Street analysts say BMS, the fifth largest global pharma company, could be a takeover target. First came FDA's refusal to review the data for Erbitux (IMS 255), BMS and ImClone's joint cancer treatment candidate in which BMS has invested more than a billion dollars. Two months later, the company announced that next year's earnings might be only half that of this year. Disappointed stockholders unloaded in droves, driving the price down nearly 15 percent. And to top it off, the board of directors has put CEO Peter Dolan on notice: one more stumble and he's

Most people experience at least one event that changes the direction of their lives. For George Rosenkranz-the man who made "the pill" possible-it was a stopover in Cuba. In 1941, he was on his way by boat from Switzerland to a position as a professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Quito in Equador. But the ship that was scheduled to pick him up in Cuba never came. Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and the world changed. So Rosenkranz-stranded on the island-went to work for a pharma company.

Executives at Enron aren't the only ones feeling the heat. ImClone's CEO and COO-brothers Samuel and Harlan Waksal-recently got an ultimatum from Bristol-Myers Squibb: Step aside and let BMS take Erbitux (IMC 225) through the approval process, or it will terminate their agreement. The Waksals refused, and BMS backed down-for now.

MICHIGAN-In an aggressive move to squeeze price discounts from the industry, Michigan recently released a list of pharmaceuticals, mostly generic and lower-priced,

Once thought to be a disease of the past, tuberculosis is now a front burner health problem.

Transfusion centers used to throw plasma away as though it were extraneous liquid, keeping only the red blood cells. During World War II, researchers discovered that the fluid left over after the red cells had been spun free contained vital proteins, and biochemist Edwin Joseph Cohn developed a method for their large scale extraction. Over the years, the scrutiny of plasma produced many new proteins that could be processed and used as life-saving medical treatments for rare blood diseases like hemophilia. Plasma fractionation is now a $6.5-billion-a-year business and more than a million people receive plasma therapeutics annually.

New York City—In response to the recent terrorist attack in its home city, Pfizer pledged nearly $10 million in aid.

If only two words could be used to describe Big Pharma's promotional spend trends during the past 12 months, they would be "it depends." Budgets are simply tools and the industry uses them as such: to determine just the right spend, on a certain type of product, during a particular phase of its life cycle.

Early e-health enthusiasts envisioned a rapid technology and information metamorphosis that could only be described as a quantum leap. In the aftermath of the dot-com shake out, pharma companies reported e-initiative progress that more accurately resembles a shuffle-with an occasional stumble. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young surveyed more than 100 senior managers from 42 pharma companies, including the top 10, to assess the current state of all things "e." The results are mixed.

Following what he refers to as "a very smooth leadership transition," Amgen's new chairman and CEO Kevin Sharer is shaking things up. In January, he created two new executive vice-president positions and went outside the company to fill them.

Carol Nacy, PHD, Has Invested Her Expertise - and her money - to fight the devastating tuberculosis epidemic.

Cancer makes neurology seem almost simple by comparison. Cancers come in a nearly infinite variety. Yet their mechanisms, scientists now surmise, may reside in the same place-deep inside the cell. DNA, genes, and cellular proteins play key roles in both disease areas.

Straddling the divide between drug discovery and drug delivery, Protarga doesn't fit neatly into any pharma category. It's not exactly a delivery technology company, because its products are patentable new entities that it plans to keep for itself. Nor is it purely biotech, because it works with chemical compounds. And in the end, president and CEO Nigel Webb expects Protarga to become a fully integrated pharma company-but only in the virtual sense.

Genentech's sprawling campus overlooking San Francisco Bay seems serene on the surface, but internally, the company resonates with energy.

Sidney Taurel Takes His Global Team Beyond Prozac