A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Here’s a neat little article on Warren Buffett’s willingness to learn from his mistakes.
 A key to investing well is a willingness to look stupid, Buffett says. “Most managers have very little incentive to make the intelligent-but-with-some-chance-of-looking-like-an-idiot decision,” Buffett wrote in 1984. Most would prefer “failing conventionally.”
He added: “Lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.”
This issue will be over-and-done soon, dear readers. Till then, have some links.
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 29, 2007”
I’m busy with those pharma profiles, but not so busy that I didn’t have time to assemble some links for you to follow into the weekend, dear reader!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 22, 2007”
From another of my pharma profiles:
In the past year, Takeda made a splash in the U.S. with its surreal commercials for sleep treatment Rozerem. Featuring such elements as Abraham Lincoln and a talking beaver, the spots are supposed to evoke the incredibly embarrassing dream-symbols that insomniacs miss out on. Lucky them.
A few months ago, I wrote about the Chrysler 300C, which appealed to me because it resembled the Batmobile. Over at 2Blowhards, Donald Pettinger writes about the 1950s’ dream cars, with a fantastic gallery of Cars of the Future:
With no place to go trend-wise, stylists thrashed around in search a new trends or themes. One such theme was aviation or space, already successfully tested by Harley Earl at General Motors. I’m thinking of a series of futuristic scale models that yielded the famous 1948 Cadillac tail fins. The success of Cadillac led stylists to go pretty wild exploring that theme — wild to the point where dream cars (and to a lesser degree some production models) looked less and less like cars.
The following was deleted from one of my pharma company profiles: “Dapoxetine was rejected by the FDA in 2005, but if its EU filing gets approval this year, another FDA submission could be coming soon.”
The best part is that the company is Johnson & Johnson.
We’re off to Louisiana for the weekend. I won’t have a chance to get to New Orleans while we’re there, so instead of beads, have some links!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 8, 2007”
I enjoy writing the big Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report each June. Sure, it’s not what I imagined I’d be doing when I was a brooding, pretentious idiot in college, but it turns out that there’s plenty of fun to be had in researching and writing these profiles.
For one thing, there’s the mystery/police procedural aspect of reading through annual reports and SEC statements and trying to figure out just what certain companies are trying to hide. Maybe it’s awful revenues from a new product (now conveniently reclassified into a group of products, so its figures aren’t broken out), or a diminished product pipeline (“I wonder why [company x] isn’t mentioning any of its late-stage projects”), or a quiet reorganization (last year, a company detailed its layoffs and plant closures, but made no statement anywhere about how much money it hoped to save in the process). It can take some detective work to figure this stuff out; I’m sure if I’d gotten myself an MBA, I could parse it more easily.
And for another thing, there’s the drugs.
I always enjoy reading through these companies’ reports to see about all the neat new therapies, the increased survival rates they bestow, the alleviation of previously uncureable conditions, the lifestyle changes we never thought possible. This, too can take some detective work, because some companies don’t seem to know what they have.
Por ejemplar: Today, I added UCB Group to my Top Biopharmas ranking. The company doesn’t have any biologic-based drugs on the market, but it’s got some in the pipeline, which is better than some of the other companies that I’ve included for years.
As part of its profile, I needed to list UCB’s best-selling drugs and how they performed last year. And that was how I discovered Nootropil, which posted around $125 million in 2006 sales.
“Nootropil?” thought I. “I wonder what that’s for . . . ?” Since I got a masters degree in liberal arts rather than business, I knew that the ‘noo-‘ root means ‘mind’ in Greek, and that left me intrigued.
According to UCB’s annual report, Nootropil’s a “cognitive enhancer.” Well, that begged more questions than it answered! Fortunately, the Internet has plenty of answers! It’s my cognitive enhancer!
Nootropil is known generically as piracetam and, according to this wiki page, it’s “a cerebral function regulating drug which, it is claimed, is able to enhance cognition and memory, slow down brain aging, increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain, aid stroke recovery, and improve Alzheimer’s, Down’s Syndrome, dementia, and dyslexia, among others.” Oh, and it has virtually no side effects.
Now if only I can convince them to send me some samples!
Phil Spector couldn’t possibly have killed Lana Clarkson! He was busy conducting drug-assays for Merck KgA!
Every summer, when we get rolling on the annual Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report, my trusty associate editor compiles pipeline information for the past year. While I suss out sales figures and try to parse the arcana of accounting, she puts together lists of new drugs that were approved, extensions or new indications for approved drugs, those that are filed and pending approval, those that have lost patent protection, research projects in late-phase or early-phase studies, and those that were canceled or rejected.
That last category, the could-have-beens, is a testament to the enormous risk that drug companies take on. This year’s #1 company, Pfizer, recently had to cancel development of a drug that would have brought in upwards of $50 billion in revenues during its lifecycle. Future revenues are kaput and $1 billion in R&D investment has been flushed away with it.
Fortunately, Michael Moore has a strategy for eliminating this expense and the risk! America needs to regulate drug companies “like utilities since they’re just as important as electricity and water.” That’ll make them more productive and less expensive! Of course!
I mean, outside of the fact that the U.S. power grid is antiquated and prone to collapse, and that the water supply in this house was provided by a well for 35 years, I’d have to say he almost knows what he’s talking about.
I do find it funny when people tell me the pharma industry needs more regulation, and that drugs should be cheaper.