Quintiles Story!

Quintiles is one of the most aggressive CRO in the world, I was impressed by its India strategy , when  it entered Indian market with a bang in 2001 and within some years had grown to more than 100 times in Indian operations compared to other CRO’s who later came and opened their operations in India beside local players, earlier it had services related from pre clinical to post marketing trials, but some 5-6 years back it sold its preclinical operations and then later diversified itself into genomic studies and recently with it has diversified itself as sole partners from genomic studies to clinical to regulatory filing.

It has strong team of more than 100 people in New York which caters to its overall strategic decisions and other portfolio diversification. If I look into their strategy of expansion into countries around the world, rather than forming very big alliances it opened its shop for business on its own and has been the pioneer or the early entrants in all the major emerging markets. In Russian federation though it formed JV and then further buy out

Earlier it was public company which became private after some years, as the new CEO has joined industry analysts believe that it will go public....we need to watch if it’s going to be a public company.....

"I view the fact that they have a new CEO now as potentially a sign that they're preparing their next leg of growth or next strategy, which could include an IPO," Moody's analyst Jessica Gladstone told Bloomberg. "An IPO could also be a way to reduce leverage and an exit strategy for the owners."

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PS: I have been watching Quintiles for more then 5-6 years from the time I have joined consultancy industry thus these are my viewpoints

Pharma consolidation.................

The Global Pharma industry is undergoing huge challenges in terms of innovation and product development, as the federal agencies are decreasing their allocation for R&D and the only option left for the big pharma daddy's is to go for consolidation and thus further creating non-profit organization, which will be in place to accelerate the development of new medicines. Last decade only we had seen TAP alliance (Takeda and Abbott) which had success story of its own. Now the top ten pharmaceutical companies like Abbott, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Genentech a member of the Roche Group, and Sanofi are consolidating their activity to identify and solve common drug development challenges with the end goals of improving the quality of life by developing novel drugs acting on Novel pathways. We Still have a ray of hope that there will be new drugs which will help us to live better life by fighting in and out with any sort of disease 

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/press-releases/ten-pharmaceutical-companies-unite-accelerate-development-new-medicines

Cloud computing....next thing after social media.......

Social media is the buzz of the town, every company is having some or the other social media site and now they are coming up with gaming, next in the series is Cloud computing application where in companies are trying to implement and configure their IT systems for managing their supply chain, Pfizer has chosen the path for cloud computing, we hope to see the Big Pharma using cloud computing application for their over all operations going forward

Emerging markets new gate away for Medical devices!

Some years back I was doing research on emerging market based medical devices companies. From the early 90's I have seen a trend that Top 10 medical devices companies have been opening their shop, initially the R&Ds focus was to support the global R&D in terms of software and technology development, but then these companies shifted their strategies on making devices and software for emerging markets, whether its Philips innovation in china or GE with their devices for the Indian market. Medtronic also ventured into the race by plan of an R&D in China, and hope that it comes out with some innovation for emerging market

Social Media Bug........

Sanofi eyes diabetics with social media

In the past two weeks I have seen two news releases regarding Big Pharma like Bayer and Sanofi going for social media services to know their target audience with metabolic disease Diabetes.

Both the German and the French drug maker have found the social media as a very important tool and have found that social media serves as a useful windows into people perception which includes the patients, physicians, regulators, Kol's and the payers  

As the competition intensifies I hope social media will be able to create wonders for Pharma as it has lead to change in scenario in FMCG market segment

Gilead product life cycle extension Strategy..........

Last time I had refereed to interest of Merck in expanding its HIV portfolio and how difficult it will be for Merck to grown in this specific segment, I feel now the competition will be more tough as some 4 days back Gilead Sciences announced that it had entered into agreement for Collaboration on promoting access to high quality generic version of Gilead HIV medicine emtricitabine (FTC), and also its fixed dose in developing countries with Mylan labs (Hyderabad), Ranbaxy (Gurgaon) and Stride Acrolab (Bangalore)

Under the said agreement Gilead will provide technology transfer to these giants and further funding for process improvements to reduce overall manufacturing cost......Gilead has now safely positioned it in the high margin segment and low price strategy segment......Now Cipla will have difficulty in growing in the said specific HIV indication per say........Real good strategy of safeguarding its monopoly 

Europe- New Regulatory guidelines!

From my B. pharmacy days i used to follow FDA and their guidelines but America has to learn many things from the Europeans in terms of regulatory guidelines recently for which there is lot of discussion happening in NICE front for new regulatory development, where in Macro level involvement of specific groups have been initiated for decision making for approval of drugs, there is lot to learn from NHS (National health services) and NICE UK. Will it be possible in India to implement these all regulations?

Generics?????

Generics have been eating our pie of revenue is the buzz following everywhere in Social media by the big players, whether its BMS and Astra, Astra at this point is in pretty bad shape as a giant which BMS was there 10 years back, BMS recovered with strategic partnership and alliances but what about Astra will it be able to cope?

These Big Pharma knew that generics will one or the other day will eat their pie of revenue and the best way to stop them is by making stringent regulations for sales and promotion.......

Astra should have thought beforehand about all this when it was making strategic blunders over the last three years ??????

After the generics and counterfeits ......it’s time for biosimilars to eat the revenue of big players