William Looney

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.

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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?

The conversation thread that binds this month's Pharm Exec is building communities-when the harsh economics of market change suddenly discounts the familiar, then the best way to move up is to reach out.

Today's most important public health story is the advance in our understanding of the biology of cancer, writes Pharm Exec Editor-in-Chief William Looney.

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.”

The calendar says its wrap-up time, not just for gifts but for some of the trends that shaped the industry-for good or bad-in 2012.

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.

Cegedim Relationship Management held its annual conference on trends in the life sciences industry last week.

Cegedim Relationship Management held its annual conference on trends in the life sciences industry last week.

Autumn is a good time to present our annual post on how well the industry is doing in harvesting value for shareholders. Our diverse list of 24 companies, drawn from Big Pharma to the established biotechs, presents a similarly mixed picture on returns: smaller firms with a distinct customer base and tight oversight of costs are by and large proving more adept at delivering the strong growth that investors still expect from this business.

This month's feature by Ben Comer highlights what's behind the new Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) imposed on GSK by theHHS Office of Inspector-General to compensate for a long list of marketing and pricing malfeasances

Pharm Exec's 2012 roster of Emerging Leaders-our sixth to date-is not only a way to recognize a few individuals who've made a difference in their organizations. It also serves as a barometer to track larger changes in the workplace.

Mastery of the clinical trial process has become essential to positioning new therapies for leadership in an increasingly crowded-and lengthy-race to registration.

In a wake up call to this year's Emerging Leaders a group of St. Joseph's Business School Health Management alumni say time has no limit on surprises-change for pharma is here and its good.