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Here’s the editorial for the new issue of the magazine I edit for my day-job. Enjoy:

You, Too?
In the Pharma business, there’s no shame in coming in second. Or third

Hardly seems like four years, but that’s how long it’s been since we launched Contract Pharma. We started with a November/December issue back in 1999, so finishing this issue each year feels something like an anniversary to me (which probably helps explain why I’ve never been married).

It doesn’t feel quite like a year-end edition, because of production lead times, which leave us around seven or eight weeks till 2004. It’s hard to get that impending New Year’s perspective when Thanksgiving is still weeks away. So, no 2004 resolutions this issue; we’ll save that for next time around (the Jan/Feb issue). Instead, I’d like to get into the topic of me-too-ism.

A recent BusinessWeek article (“Is Viagra Vulnerable?” Oct. 27, 2003) goes in-depth with the marketing staff for Lilly, which is responsible for handling the launch of Cialis, a competitor to Viagra and Levitra. Cialis will be backed with a $100 million direct-to-consumer publicity campaign, a first for Lilly (which developed the drug with Icos). The campaign is intended to differentiate the new drug from the others in its class, with the long-term goal, according to Lilly chief executive officer Sidney Taurel, of reaching $2 billion in annual sales for Cialis by 2010.

Reading the piece during the flight to AAPS, the line in the article that caught my attention was from Leonard M. Blum, Icos’ vice president of sales and marketing. Expressing the challenges Cialis faces, he said, “There aren’t many examples in our industry of products launched in second or third position that end up becoming the leader. It’s a tall order.”

Doubtless, this line surprises some of my readers, just as it surprised me; it seemed antithetical to the practices of the Pharma industry as we know it. After all, the recent history of the Pharma business is filled with drugs that were second-in-class and managed to perform just fine in the marketplace. In fact, a recent study by McKinsey, published in a Nature Reviews supplement, indicated that, of the 32 biggest blockbuster drugs of the past decade, the number of “first-in-class” drugs was matched by the number of “me-too” products that were launched more than 15 years after the “first-in-class” drugs. The study also indicated that, of the nearly 200 drugs launched by the top 15 Pharma companies during that period, the highest per-drug sales amounts were among “fast followers,” launched between two and 15 years after the original.

Obviously, Nexium is still rolling along just fine, last I checked (which would have been during our July/August Top Companies report), despite being a late-comer in the proton-pump inhibitor market. Similarly, there’s room for more than one statin out there (and AstraZeneca’s hoping there’s room for one more with Crestor). In fact, over at In the Pipeline, Contract Pharma contributor Derek Lowe discusses the reductio ad absurdum argument that drug companies should only focus on me-too drugs, since they’re the most profitable. Of course, the reality is that, if every company did this, no one would put out any new drugs, and the drug cycle would end in one patent period.

Now, this isn’t to say that Cialis has nothing to worry about, or that its success is assured by its not being the first drug in its class. Nor, however, does it seem as uphill a task as Mr. Blum made it out to be to BusinessWeek. It’ll certainly be an adventure in marketing, as the three companies work to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, while remaining within the boundaries of taste and discretion. But, given the American shift to “lifestyle” drugs, and the graying of the population, being “third-in-class” shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for Cialis to overcome.

A grad-school buddy of mine, writing pseudonymously, offers this column in the Iranian.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the shooting death of Jam Master Jay. And there I was, wondering why I heard My Adidas on three different stations during the day.

I’m back from Utah. I called Ian and Jess out in San Diego, and they’re not in any danger from the fires. And the NBA season has started, so my life can now stop for a few months.

One thing, though: For some reason, many (but not all) home teams are now wearing their dark uniforms, rather than their whites. Most of you readers likely aren’t big sports fans, but this is a subtly disturbing phenomenon. See, normally, you know which team is playing at home when you glance at the screen and see the white uniforms. So it’s kinda odd when the team in dark unis hits a basket, and the crowd cheers.

It’s nothing I’d lodge a protest over (as opposed to the truly freakish, Hefty-bag-esque uniforms the Dallas Mavericks unveiled for their first game).

Went out last night to a hospitality event thrown by one of our advertisers. We went to the Olympic Oval, a training facility for the 2002 skaters. We went curling and shooting hockey pucks. Pictures to come, unfortunately.

Many thanks to Ian for turning me on to Gorillaz and Thievery Corporation! I have discovered many new beats during this trip! Let’s all hope that Ian and his True Love, who live in San Diego, remain safe from the fires.

The iPod holds up! A rambling hike yields some great photos! Salt Lake City on a Sunday is like 28 Days Later, but without the zombies!

The Gil Roth “King of the Road” Tour continues, as I head out to Salt Lake City for the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) annual meeting. Last week was Phoenix and San Diego, combining business & pleasure. After Utah, I’m back for 10 days before heading off to Atlanta for 3 days for the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) annual meeting. Then I’m back for another 10 days before taking The Big Vacation. All told, 2003 will involve 25 takeoffs & landings. As long as none of them match my Takeoff of Horror last Wednesday from Newark, I’ll be a happy man.

Which is to say, as long as I have the iPod, I should be okay.

According to my webstats, at 4:45am this morning, someone came to this blog by Googling the following:

Red Sox fan commits suicide

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer and Mickey Kaus both have pretty good takes on the debacle of Easterbrook’s strange Kill Bill blog. Kaus also links to about 10 million other blogs that discuss (or mindlessly rant about) Easterbrook’s entry and subsequent apology.

Funnily enough, Shafer actually had the exact same reaction I did when he read the column last Monday. He writes:

The moral posturing and witless embrace of loathsome cultural stereotypes found in these 84 words seemed so un-Easterbrook that I hoped that someone would e-mail me the news that somebody had hacked Gregg’s blog and inserted this bogus copy.

I’m glad that people who are close to Easterbrook have defended him as a person, even as they’ve criticized his work in this instance. It’s much better than reading, “Y’know, he told me he was collecting that Nazi memorabilia for a special project, but I never thought…”

Anyway, it seems that this rant of his got out of hand, such was his indignation at Tarantino’s film (which I’m now dying to see, admittedly). It’s not like he’d be the first blogger to misstep; it’s more a sign of his gravitas that such comments were taken so seriously (though I still contend they’re more muddled than anti-semitic). Anyone who’s read this blog in the past 8 months knows that essay-like entries can really go off the rails sometimes.

One other disturbing thing: It completely slipped my mind when I was writing the first entry, but ESPN (where TMQ was published each week) is actually owned by Disney. See, I thought TMQ’s quick hook was a post-Limbaugh response by ESPN. But now, it raises a more sinister question: Did a high-up at Disney (Eisner or Weinstein, perhaps) call for Easterbrook’s firing? Media consolidation sucks.

I hope that Tuesday Morning Quarterback resurfaces somewhere like Slate (where the column originated).

Or at Virtual Memories! Why, I’m pretty unconsolidated, by Big Media terms (well, I do run a publishing company by night, edit a pharmaceutical magazine by day, and watch NFL Direct Ticket on Sundays)!

So let it be known that I am now offering Gregg Easterbrook a place to post his Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns. I can’t promise that my server won’t collapse under the weight of the new traffic, but I can offer an absoluete minimum of editorial interference (after all, I am used to running a trade magazine)!

Ouch. Gregg Easterbrook — whose essays I enjoy and whose Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns on ESPN Page 2 are always a hoot — just got canned from the latter gig. I meant to write about his blog on The New Republic’s site last week, because he wrote an entry that I found pretty incomprehensible. Since the blog doesn’t use internal bookmark hyperlinks, you’ll have to go to here or over the Easterbrook link on the left side of this page, and scroll down to the 10.13.03 entry about Kill Bill and Quentin Tarantino’s fatuousness.

I don’t agree with his stance on the complete uselessness of Tarantino’s work, and I think Ron Rosenbaum makes a very neat case for Oliver Stone and Tarantino serving as stand-ins for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but it was the closing paragraph that I found troubling and incomprehensible. And it’s why he’s been fired from his ESPN gig (and, in Soviet fashion, throw in the memory hole of the Page 2 site).

If you’re too lazy to go to the page itself, shame on you. But here’s the paragraph in question:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can’t possibly miss the message–now Disney’s message–that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

I’ve read a bunch of Easterbrook’s work. I know that he’s a devout Christian, but not, as near as I could tell, an anti-semite. So the notion that Eisner and Weinstein, as Jews, “worship money above all else,” was disturbing. There’s been an uproar (I hate when people use the term ‘furor’ for this sorta thing, for obvious reasons) about the blog, and Easterbrook’s editor, a Jew, spoke out to defend him and criticize blogs (somewhat predictably).

Anyway, one of the reasons I didn’t write about this entry at the time was because I simply didn’t understand where he was coming from. The criticism of Jews came so out of left field that I actually thought the blog had been hacked that morning. It hadn’t. On Thursday, Easterbrook wrote an apology. Unfortunately, it didn’t make his argument that much clearer, and it seemed to imply that all Jews, as Jews, should think in certain ways. If you read it differently, please drop me an e-mail so we can discuss it.

PS: I won’t buy a Volkswagen. My father drives a Mercedes-Benz. We differ on a lot of subjects, and we’re just two Jews.