Bayer with its new move! ........Roche whats its next steps?

I have always been fascinated with the diagnostic industry as I have worked on many projects related to it....Bayer as a company is the name I remember from my childhood days as we used to use a lot of Baygon spray at our home in tropical islands of Andaman. After joining the KPO industry in 2007, I have been keeping a track of Bayer in general with regards to its Diagnostic portfolio, Bayer used to sell its blood glucose meters along with J&J and Roche who are also one of the major players in the segment of continuous and other blood sugar diagnosis systems.....but yesterday there was a news that it is going to discontinue any advances in the current portfolio and has shifted its focus on Companion diagnostic for oncology by forming an alliance with Qiagen....this year we had two more major events in this companion diagnostic segment, Roche has released its press release for its interest in companion diagnostic for Breast cancer and further BMS went ahead for alliance with Life tech for companion diagnostics in Oncology......Both BMS and Bayer are moving into the space but what we have to look for if Roche will only restrict itself with companion diagnostics for Breast cancer or it will further expand into other Oncology indications???


Roche as a science driven company, has a good hold in both blood sugar diagnosis system and now will eventually try to have a monopoly in companion diagnostics......what we have to see if J&J joins the race by partnering with Agilent or will continue with its own program which it started in 2011 or some other big fish going to join the race pretty soon?

Merck Millipore Price Hikes!!!

Today I was looking at this news from Merck Millipore that they are going to increase the price for their Biopharmaceutical products, similar ways we need to see if other bigger players such as Pall, GE (Amersham) and small scale players in Indian market like MDI are going to increase their price??


If the price increase is happening then we might see increase is the pilot to production scale for both biologics and biosimilars, is the common man pocket going to be effected more?????? As companies might increase the cost of products as basic production costs will increase......

Many questions are creeping into my grey cells...........

FDA on social media path

My client knows that I am great fan of social media and like to exploit it to full potential, as I am travelling for sometime I am not able to jot down much in the blog, Last Friday she sent me an development on FDA developing more social media guidance for development of efforts related to advertising and promotion, I was happy to know that FDA is also going with the pace of Pharma world in terms of web promotions, I hope EMA will also adopt social media approaches. This blog update is dedicated to my beautiful client who always challenges me with new updates and makes me aware of all updates about social media

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