Category: Pharmaceuticals

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Will I never learn?

Oh, sure, I know you all think it’s easy being me. I know how you envy the dashing, romantic, debonair life of a pharmaceutical trade magazine editor who lives in a quiet, no-restaurant town a little beyond the suburbs. But it’s not all wine and roses, I tellya!

Take today, for example. Last night, I crashed at a friend’s apartment on 13th St. so I could get to an 8:30am presentation at the Waldorf. No problem, except that the presentation went on till noon with a short coffee break. That ran out of coffee. So I grabbed some scorched Starbucks in the lobby and figured I’d get something to eat on the way back down to the garage where I’d parked the night before.

Unfortunately, it was awfully cold out, and I’d forgotten that there aren’t any restaurants up around the Waldorf. I figured I’d pass on the street-meat kiosk, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to sit down and eat, and caught a cab down to 13th St.

Perhaps I was getting a little punchy with hunger, but I thought, “Well, as long as I’m in the area, I may as well stop in at the Strand on the way back to the car.”

And that’s where my troubles began.

See, dear reader, it’s one thing for me to go without food (and with crappy coffee) for a while. It’s another to be in a low blood sugar mode while walking around a giant used bookstore.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Strand, in part because it’s not a very serendipitous bookstore for me. For some reason, I can’t just meander around, pick something up, and start unspooling creative threads all around the labyrinth of the mythocreative mind. Maybe the shelves are too tall in the sides of the store, or the selections are too extensive. I’m not sure. But I have far greater luck when I go to a place like the Montclair Book Center.

That said, I usually find books to buy at the Strand. I just don’t find inspiration.

So I picked up a bunch of books today, including a collection of journalism about Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, some gifts for friends, and a couple of discounted comic collections. I began my trek to the checkout line, resigned to carry both a bag of books and my work-bag (laptop inside) a few blocks along 13th to my friend’s place, where I would pick up my overstuffed overnight bag (Amy stayed last night too, which cut her morning commute from 2 hours to 10 minutes) before walking back down the block to the car.

And that’s when I saw it:

Yep: 11 volumes of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison (reviews here). Never released in the U.S., and exorbitantly expensive to order from the UK.

So, minutes later, I found myself slinging my work-bag over my shoulder and hauling 2 enormous bags of books down 13th St. Where the overstuffed overnight bag awaited. Somehow, I got back down the block with all 4 bags; my slanted shoulders were not happy and kept shrugging the non-Strand bags off. But I got to the garage, picked up my car, and figured I’d just get out of NYC and get something to eat back in NJ.

I spent the next 45 minutes sitting in various stages of traffic and regretting that decision. Only two things got me through the trip home: the promise of White Manna and Howard Stern playing an audio clip of David O. Russell flipping out on Lily Tomlin. And $125 in Orwell books. Okay, so maybe it is pretty easy being me. I’ll shut up now.

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Be funny for me!

As longtime readers (and friends) know, I can be tremendously boring. Fortunately, my readers (and friends) are plenty funny. Writes my buddy Tina, “Read a news article today. I don’t know if I’d believe this particular advocate. . .”

A self-inserted vaginal ring that protects from pregnancy for three weeks straight goes on sale in Australia from Tuesday.

The ring can be removed for up to three hours at a time but specialists say it’s better that women get into the habit of leaving it in.

“NuvaRing can be left in during sex and most guys won’t even notice that it’s there,” said GP and reproductive health advocate Dr Sally Cockburn.

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Wish your cancer away!

Good thing the British National Health Service has been trying to reduce its reimbursement for Herceptin, a very focusedly effective breast cancer treatment*. That way, they can spend money on dowsers, flower therapists, and crystal healers! Yay!

(thanks to Cato-at-Liberty for pointing this one out)

* By which I mean, Herceptin works really well against around 25% of breast cancers, but is not effective against the other types. That said, it’s a major advance in treatment. Pity that, since it doesn’t work for every case, the NHS tried to keep it off the reimbursement list.

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Bizspeak

I read a lot of financial earnings statements at my job. I learned early on that “pro forma” and “adjusted” numbers, intended to give a true reflection of a company’s performance, are usually crap, and that when a company takes a different “extraordinary charge” each quarter, then they’re not so extraordinary, and the company is just fudging its accounting.

So it’s in that vein that I present to you this morning’s earnings statement by Sanofi-Aventis, “In a Difficult Environment, Another Year of Growth in Adjusted EPS Excluding Selected Items”

In order to give a better representation of its underlying economic performance, the group has decided to present and explain an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2006 and the fourth quarter of 2006, and to compare them with an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2005 and the fourth quarter of 2005 respectively.

Which is a bit like saying, “Excluding sectarian violence, our nation-building mission in Iraq is doing well.”

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Say hello to Hollywood

Derek Lowe writes about a great article in the February issue of The Scientist. The anonymous author discusses the flaws in the R&D model among major pharma companies and develops an interesting method of fixing them: Go Hollywood!

Big Pharma continues to follow the old studio model, though there are signs that this may be changing. A similar and necessary evolution to what Hollywood underwent in the 1950s may be beginning, with increasingly more drugs being discovered outside Big Pharma, presumably because the R&D process elsewhere is more conducive to creativity. Biotechs or small pharma settings tend to be flexible and nonhierarchical, with a tolerance for mistakes and constructive dissent — all characteristics of environments that nurture creativity and innovation. Consequently, the trend towards more drugs being discovered outside Big Pharma is likely to accelerate.

There is a precedent for pharma emulating Hollywood: Pharma’s main preoccupation, the creation of blockbusters, was directly copied from Hollywood. The blockbuster model is really defined by broad and aggressive marketing, though the term is less accurately, if more commonly, used to define revenue thresholds. Hollywood’s blockbuster model was created in 1951, when the term was first applied to the movie Quo Vadis because of its then-huge budget of $7 million and the unprecedented zeal of its promotion.

I know it sounds bizarre, and it may be dry subject matter, but this is a really compelling opinion piece, and I think laymen (like myself) can gain a lot of perspective from it on some of the problems with developing new drugs.