ARTICLES BY LOUIS

• What Beer Can Teach Us About Outsourcing

  5/6/2014

  I’m not a biologist or chemist, but apply these disciplines to beer and my interest is immediately piqued. Mix in a discussion of outsourcing – contract brewing, if you will – and we add a dose of professional relevance as well. Yes, this article is related to the pharma industry, so stay with me here if the beer reference didn't wet your thirst.

  First, though, an anecdote about the beer. It starts years ago when the production of my favorite brew was outsourced abroad to serve international markets. The taste never matched up to the original, as confirmed by aficionados of this brand around the world. I was recently reminded of this situation while reading a review in the Wall Street Journal of the new book The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy. For one thing, it appears outsourcing in the microbrew industry – the biotechs of beer – is being questioned. Would a microbrew from, for example, Brooklyn Brewery, be less than honest with its customers if they outsourced production far from the five boroughs?

• CPhI Report: For Manufacturing “Process” Or “Quality,” It's Statistical Control

  4/24/2014

  According to a new report entitled CPhI Pharma Insights, pharma needs to drive manufacturing forward, and advancements should come from within companies, not from the outside push of regulatory bodies. Advancements coming from within will lead to lower costs and improved quality. When the advancements are pushed from the outside, they can keep prices high and hurt efficiencies.

  The report, based on a cross-section of industry participants in a survey on manufacturing, is a succinct read and analysis of the current state and future needs in this segment of the pharmaceutical industry. What with recent and very publicized quality-related challenges in manufacturing – both at outsourced plants and internal facilities – it would have been surprising if quality hadn’t come out in the survey as the top focus for pharma. Indeed, “improving product quality” was ranked number one.

• Is Long-Term Unemployment An Issue For Pharma?

  4/24/2014

  As we slipped into the booth at the local diner, it occurred to me that the last time I had spoken to Glen was at this same venue. “Yeah, that was two years ago,” he said with a tinge of nostalgia. Two years ago? Time had flown by for me but I know it was not the case for him. Glen still had not found a new full-time position.

  A Ph.D. scientist (organic chemistry) with solid people skills and senior management experience, I was surprised when he got down-sized. I was just as sure he would end up in a good place in the long-run. Unfortunately, the long-run never came. After pursuing “more than 100 legitimate job leads and conversations throughout the pharmaceutical industry,” Glen is still looking for a new job. And just like that, I found myself sitting face-to-face with the long-term unemployment epidemic that is afflicting many individuals in the U.S., as well as scientists and pharmaceutical employees from around the world.

• The Language Of Our Industry

  4/21/2014

  True character and the quality of our thoughts are revealed in the way we talk about ourselves and the events in which we participate. We may purposely affect certain patterns of language, but the real thing is sooner or later uncovered.

   

  Or something like that. We also know we have to walk the talk, as the more succinct saying puts it. Considering specifically the language of the contract drug discovery, development and manufacturing industry, in a recent outsourcing survey conducted by contractpharma.com, 75% of respondents said that they would use the word “partnership” to describe their relationship with their contract service providers. That has to be good news for both pharma sponsors and the CROs/CMOs around the world, and points to an improvement in level of service delivered by the latter.

• Sun Pharma, Ranbaxy and the Deming Management Method

  4/8/2014

  Where the Japanese have failed, the Indians will succeed? Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd has not only agreed to step in and purchase Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, symbolically they have stepped up to the plate for the entire Indian manufacturing industry. It is in some regards an audacious move: The Japanese, known for high quality manufacturing standards, could not bring Ranbaxy through its challenges. It may not have been a strike out for Daiichi Sankyo, but they have taken a walk. Now an Indian manufacturer is in the batter’s box for team India.

  Sun Pharma is not downplaying the objective here. “ We are not looking at synergies of manufacturing; the focus is to achieve compliance" at Ranbaxy, said Dilip Shanghvi, managing director of Sun Pharma. Competitors or otherwise, shouldn’t all India wish them well? The rest of the world – and the FDA – is surely watching carefully.

• Who Is Next? Consolidation And Proliferation In The CRO/CMO Market

  4/4/2014

  You can almost hear the questions blowing in on the winds of spring: Who is next? Could it be WuXi PharmaTech looking for a partner in the West or another Chinese provider for consolidation? Or from India, maybe a Jubilant in the hunt? Renewed talk of mergers and acquisitions is in the air.

  Charles River Laboratories (CRL), which nearly wed WuXi a few years ago, and in so doing would have brought East and West outsourcing together in a dramatic fashion, has made it through the ceremony this time and acquired the discovery assets of Belgium-based Galapagos NV, an intriguing U.S.-Europe combination. The specific target assets are BioFocus and Argenta, with both of those being past acquisitions of Galapagos. This one deal is clearly indicative of what the industry – perhaps including pharmaceutical sponsors – has been anticipating.

• A Response From India

  3/28/2014

  A recent article I wrote for Outsourced Pharma on challenges for the Indian outsourcing industry struck a chord with some readers and elicited some high notes. The “music” came from readers in India as well as other countries, and thankfully was upbeat and progressive for the most part.

  Some of the responses reminded this columnist of parts of a book titled “Rivals,” [1] which was published in 2008 by Bill Emmott. Within the book is a discourse on the Indian economy and its relationship (rivalry) with China. More about the book in a moment.

  To sum up the sentiment from readers in India regarding the current topic and article, this one sentence speaks volumes: “India’s low cost is becoming a problem for the whole country.”

   

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  [1] “Rivals”; Bill Emmott, published by Harcourt, Inc. ; 2008

• Communicating R&D Innovations Early And Carefully

  3/5/2014

  You would expect a room full of communications, marketing and public relations professionals to be exuberant in their discussion of how to deliver the company message across platforms and generally boast about their brands. While some of that did take place at the 3^rd Annual Life Science Brand Reputation and Communications Conference in Atlanta (February 20-21), a lot of the discussion focused on FDA regulations and SEC concerns, and the checks and balances applied to patient, media and investor communications by internal legal and investor relations departments.

• The Survey Says Affordability … And More

  2/21/2014

  Life Science is an industry driven by data, with human lives depending on it at any moment of the day. For outsourcing providers hoping to keep on top of sponsor perceptions of CMOs, the data of record is the industry-leading surveyor firm, Nice Insight. Recently they have been helping the industry parse the results of their 2013-2014 Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Survey.

  The data from this survey is sliced and diced by pharma around the world to help them do some benchmarking (pun intended) of CRO and CMO partners. The Survey serves as a vital aid in helping select the right outsourcing providers, both from a strategic and tactical perspective for individual research programs as well as manufacturing projects. It can also assist with internal versus industry comparisons. For example, it can give insight into questions such as “Why was the experience that I had with a certain CRO different from that of another pharma firm?” And because we work in an industry where  by necessity information is kept confidential, the pharmaceutical sponsors and service providers are often protective of conveying too much information about their relationships (provided they are providing any information at all). The beauty of the survey is that it provides industry-wide data that is available for all of us to peruse and analyze.

• It's A Regional Sale For Contract Research/Manufacturing

  2/3/2014

  During the last few weeks I had the opportunity to speak with three experienced and successful business development professionals in the pharmaceutical contract manufacturing arena. They asked to remain anonymous, so I will simply refer to them as Hu, Himani, and Henry. What I got from these discussions with three individuals from three different countries was contrasting views on outsourcing and the future direction of the contract research and manufacturing industry. You can look at these as different world views, or to put it more accurately, different regional views.