A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
Sorry for the paucity of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been pretty burned out from work. Plus, we spent last night picking up my wife’s new Mini Cooper S, which has her pretty excited. Pix to follow this weekend.
Your Unrequred Reading is carefully hidden away under that “more” link!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 8, 2006”
What a difference two days make. On Nov. 30, Pfizer gave an “R&D open house” event where it discussed its drug pipeline. The biggest drug in that pipeline is torcetrapib, a compound that raises “good” cholesterol. For years, Pfizer’s been developing it as a combo-drug with Lipitor (atorvastatin), which reduces “bad” cholesterol.
Prior to the meeting, Pfizer issued a press statement that included this passage about torcetrapib:
Commenting on torcetrapib/atorvastatin (T/A), Dr. LaMattina said, “We are first-in-class and we intend to remain best-in-class in a category that has the potential to change the face of cardiovascular medicine. T/A raises HDL and lowers LDL. We believe that the net benefits of the drug — characterized by significant HDL elevation and LDL lowering vs. the small elevation in blood pressure — will greatly benefit patients with CV risk.
“The development of T/A has required tremendous innovation on our part from the earliest stages of discovery through one of the most cutting-edge development programs ever carried out anywhere. At the end of this comprehensive program, we expect to have a medicine with unparalleled efficacy in raising HDL, lowering LDL and with an anti-atherosclerosis indication.
“We will learn of the top-line results of the three pivotal imaging trials during the first quarter of 2007. During this same period, we will also receive the results of some additional Phase III lipid studies. To obtain a reliable picture of the overall safety and efficacy profile of T/A, the results of all these studies will need to be analyzed and reviewed together, and this will happen in the context of the American College of Cardiology Meeting in March, 2007.”
Yesterday, Pfizer announced that its independent Drug Safety Monitoring Board discovered a significantly higher mortality rate in the torcetrapib wing of late-stage clinical trials. The results must have been overwhelming, because Pfizer said that it’s stopping the trials, canceling all development of the drug, and accelerating its restructuring plans. A few days earlier, the company announced that it would lay off 2,400 sales reps, as part of its reorganization. Torcetrapib’s failure means large numbers of people will be getting fired in the next few weeks.
If you follow the pharma industry, you already understand what a cataclysmic event this is for Pfizer. I don’t think it’s on the scale of a Vioxx, because there’s likely no legal liability issues, but the lost sales will be in the tens of billions. Beyond that, there’s the opportunity cost of the R&D that was performed on the product, as well as nearly $800 million in actual development costs.
I’m not trying to convey a “poor little Pfizer” impression here; I disagree with a bunch of the company’s practices (particularly its growth-by-acquisition model from the first half of this decade). What I’m trying to get across is that developing new drugs is a mighty risky proposition. I’m not sure that people who complain, “Drugs are too expensive; pharma companies are evil,” have much idea about the risks and the costs these companies incur.
(You know you wanna check out the pix from my meanders in Toronto on Friday)
Home from Toronto a lot easier than my boss, whose flight home on Friday got cancelled due to “the airspace over Boston,” according to his pilot. He asked if this meant the bad weather & high winds we had all over the northeast, and was told that it did not. So, after 4 hours in an Embraer 145, he was allowed to leave and headed back to our hotel, where he sat in the bar and watched hockey.
Meanwhile, official VM buddy Sam and I went to see the Raptors play the Celtics in what Sam called “battle of the worst coaches in the NBA.” Since the Raptors have a game tonight against the Knicks, we figured maybe it’s a round-robin tournament.
We had fun at the game, but it was despite the action on the court. Sam’s now been to two NBA games with me (we hit a Dallas game against Orlando in April 2005), and he’s convinced I have NBA-Tourette’s, in which a constant stream of analysis & invective pours forth from my mouth during professional basketball games. We joined up with my boss after the game for a drink or two. He seemed pretty exhausted by the hurry-up-and-wait. I admit: if I were stuck in an Embraer for 4 hours, I’d probably go bananas.
Earlier in the day, after I visited Sam’s company in Oakville and toured the company’s produciton facilities (not as heavy-duty containment suiting as I wore on Thursday), I wandered around Toronto a little, while the weather was clear.
Unfortunately, this wandering didn’t coincide exactly with the clear weather, and I was stuck in some darned cold rain for a while. Early in my meander, I stopped at the Roots store in the Eaton Centre to get a hat and gloves. But then I decided that they were kinda pricey and, besides, the weather was okay now, so it would stay that way forever.
From there, I exited onto Yonge Street, which I forgot was an interesting amalgam of high-end retail, good record stores, and low-rent strip clubs. I headed off from there to a used bookstore I remembered from a past trip, but didn’t find anything.
I decided I’d walk through the University district and visit the famed comic store, The Beguiling. I spent a while there, hoping the weather would clear again and trying to justify spending $240 (Canadian) for a limited print by Sammy Harkham of a golem walking in the forest. I held off (I’ll wait till the USD appreciates against Canada’s dollar, and I’d probably be fine with a panel from The Poor Sailor anyway).
One of the nice things about having started doing yoga is that rambling ambles like this one don’t seem to give me the slight mid-back pain I was getting the past few years. I’ve only been on it for a few weeks or so, so hey.
During this walk, I came across two things I didn’t take pictures of: the Bata Shoe Museum and the Robarts Library. The former looks entertaining enough, and I bought a postcard from there for Amy, to give us yet another reason to take a long weekend here in the springtime.
The Library, on the other hand, is one of the most overwhelmingly depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. It may’ve been worse because of the rain and gray skies, but I can’t imagine a scenario which the appearance of this building inspires anything but fear and dread. Don’t let 1970s architecture happen to you!
After I left The Beguiling emptyhanded, it was time for another overpriced cab ride back to the hotel. I was amazed by the cost of cab rides in this city, as well as the ones I had to take to the pharma companies, which were outside the city. The flat-rate limo-y cars were also awfully expensive, including $51 CAD for the 20-minute ride from downtown to the airport.
In keeping with my recent post about accumulating all sorts of change and foreign currency, I returned home this morning with about $47 in Canadian bills and change. I feel like George Soros.
Anyway, a really neat thing happened during the short (54-minute) flight today. We completed our initial descent through the cloud cover, and all I could see were brown-gray hills and a few houses and a winding road or two. I thought, “We’re only 15 minutes from landing, but I have NO idea where we are right now.” It looked like Pennsylvania farmland, or far western NJ.
Then I noticed the Sheraton Crossroads to port, and it hit me: I was looking down at my morning commute! Sure enough, Rt. 17 threaded away from the Sheraton, southeast to Ramsey. Our plane followed Rt. 208 for a bit, as I picked out landmark after landmark (the Nabisco plant, the Ikea across from Garden State Plaza, even the Lukoil I stopped in last week). I’ve only had this perspective from a plane once before. Usually, I come home at night, or on different flight paths.
It helps to see things from different angles. Except Raptors/Celtics games.
(check out a couple of pix from my Toronto walkabout)
I spent a chunk of the day wearing containment gear during a visit to a drug manufacturing facility near Toronto. Unfortunately, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before the visit, so there was no way to take photos of myself in this amazing get-up.
My guide for this tour told me that the facility’s policies are for redundant safeguards against contamination (there’s some high potency materials in this site), so we were overdoing it for the sake of added safety. Even so, we didn’t enter any of the production suites where the material actually gets handled; the staff in those rooms wear full rebreather gear on a daily basis.
So, as you can tell, I’ve started another trip. This one’s pretty brief: I’ll be visiting one more drug manufacturer tomorrow, then hitting the Raptors/Celtics game with my contact at that company, official VM buddy Sam Ricchezza, last seen writing the Raptors report in our NBA preview, and goofing on me for not coming up to visit him and see his company.
Right about now, I’m hitting up the minibar for a caffeine fix. I’m also eyeing the pod-coffee machine pretty suspiciously, but it might be necessary to keep me awake till dinner, which we’ll be having at Rain, which “was once the site of Toronto’s first women’s prison,” according to the site.
Anyway, I took Shakespeare Wars with me (hardcoveritude be damned!), and have enjoyed the first 50+ pages. I’ve also got my Yoga for Regular Guys with me, since I’m trying to make a habit/practice of that. The weather’s pretty grotesque, so I doubt I’ll be able to take any good pictures. It’s a pity, since Toronto’s a kinda neat city. It’s my 3rd trip here, and it’s always struck me as a pretty good place to be. Admittedly, I know nothing about the economics of the place.
I admit that I’m a little compulsive about checking traffic on my site. It’s not a very significant number, but it helps me feel a little wanted, and sometimes I can figure out if old friends or recent acquaintances are checking up on this blog, via the IP address and other info that SiteMeter shows me. Usually, I can see if the user was referred to my site by an external link, or a search engine. Lately, a lot of people have gotten here by searching for images of Giada De Laurentiis. Some stay a while. It’s a funny world.
This morning, something strange happened. I noticed a significant bump in traffic: about 30 people or so had checked in before 8 in the morning. I decided to look into the details, and discovered that nearly all of them were from the far east, and they were all going directly to a single post of mine, Moon over Malaysia.
Longtime readers who remember too much for their own good may recall this post. It was about how the Malaysian Biotechnology Corp. wanted me to stop by for an interview during the BIO conference in Chicago last April. When I looked up the country’s official policies toward Israel (“it doesn’t exist”), I declined the invite, writing a polite note to the PR rep in New York who was trying to arrange the meeting. I never heard back from them. It’s all in the post.
This morning, and late last night, and all throughout today, I kept receiving hits to that exact post. What was particularly interesting (or scary) was that not a single one of those hits included a “referring URL.” That is, there wasn’t a link on another site that led all these people to my site.
As far as I know, this means that they either all got the link via e-mail (but not a web-based e-mail like Gmail or Yahoo!, which would have left a referring URL), or there’s some site out there that linked to my post and is, um, secret enough not to leave a trace on SiteMeter. And it has users in the following locations:
Tanjong Tokong, Malaysia
Bilit, Malaysia
Kampong Sinempuan, Malaysia
Kampong Abu Bakar, Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Kampong Tepi Sungai, Malaysia
Sungai Besi, Malaysia
Val D’Or, Malaysia
Alexandria, Egypt
Dakar, Singapore
Coatbridge, UK
Hull, UK
Sheffield, UK
Cardiff, Wales
Berlin, Germany
Perth, Australia
Melbourne, Australia
Toyama, Japan
Sterling Heights, Michigan
Garden City, NY (the user was on a computer at Adelphi University, alma mater of Baba Booey)
Some of these people stayed for only a second, while others hung on for a while or moved around on this blog. No one left a comment.
It was a little troubling, I admit. Fortunately, when I got home tonight, I received some reassurance.
It seems that, while the Malaysians were creeping around my site, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were busy driving through my neighborhood. They left a flyer in my door proclaiming “The End of False Religion Is Near!” So, y’know, I got that going for me. . .
For years, one of my favorite trade-show goodie-scores was a baseball cap from the legal firm of Morrison & Foerster, because it featured the company’s abbreviated name: mofo.
I lost the hat during my drive down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible in 2004, heading from San Fran to San Diego. I was peeved, especially because I lost the hat a moment after passing a warning sign about high winds.
Now, at last, I have a replacement. And it’s all thanks to the architectural firm of Hooker and Cockram.
While the rest of America has to make up its mind about which way to vote tomorrow, I have to figure out if I want to spend $100 for a ticket to an Orlando Magic game, then spend $100 on cab fare to and from the arena, since I’m currently in the Disney Protectorate of Lake Buena Vista.
Which is to say, it’s not looking good, dear readers.
Fortunately, I found a bar that serves some high-end gin. So I have options, is all I’m saying.
Becaues we’re in Mauschwitz, the keynote address for our conference was a 45-minute presentation by a representative from the Disney Institute. He discussed innovation issues, and how what Disney does can translate into practices for the healthcare industry.
Which means, I guess, that drug companies should “lobby” members of congress into extending drug-patents indefinitely into the future, the way Disney has done with the copyright for Mickey Mouse. That’s innovation!
(here’s the From the Editor column from my magazine this month)
Sometimes, writing this column requires compulsive news-trawling, and my paranoid-detective method of reading people’s quotes. It can be a painstaking process, involving market and biographical research, trend analysis, and interpretations of government health statistics. And sometimes there’s a Vioxx trial, in which case this column pretty much just writes itself.
Recently, Merck won a federal Vioxx suit in New Orleans. The plaintiff, Robert Smith, took Vioxx for four months and suffered a heart attack. Or we could say that Mr. Smith was obese, had high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, took Vioxx for four months, and suffered a heart attack after shoveling snow for nearly an hour. After the verdict, Merck’s lead lawyer on the trial, Philip Beck, commented, “Unfortunately, Mr. Smith would have suffered a heart attack whether he was taking Vioxx or not.” After a few hours of deliberation, the jury agreed with Mr. Beck.
But that’s not the part of this trial that so lends itself to my mean-spirited but occasionally entertaining tirades. No, that honor is reserved for Mr. Smith’s lawyer, Christopher Seeger, who is the plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel for federal Vioxx suits. According to the Reuters report for the trial verdict, Mr. Seeger didn’t exactly put his heart into this one:
“This was a defense pick. . . . It was an impossible case to win going in,” said Chris Seeger, . . . referring to the process of selecting which lawsuits go to trial.
He said Merck could have settled the suit for far less than the $10 million to $15 million it cost them to take it to court, but the company’s “scorched earth strategy” leaves no room for such calculations.
Got that? Provided his definition of ‘impossible’ is the same as mine, it would seem that Mr. Seeger, who co-represents 39 law firms across the country in federal Vioxx suits, pursued a case that he knew he had no chance of winning. From that second quoted paragraph, I infer that he pushed this ‘impossible case to win’ because he wanted to get paid off by Merck to make Mr. Smith go away. A shakedown like this would embarrass the mafia, but it seems that Mr. Seeger and the 39 law firms figure that enough of these $10–$15 million price tags for victories (could it really have cost Merck that much?) will lead Merck to start settling, which will bring them contingency fees without the risk of going to trial. Merck, on the other hand, seems to have the mindset that forcing the Contingency Corps to walk away with empty pockets will cause the ‘impossible cases’ to go away on their own. And that might be the biggest tort reform of all.
While I think there is a benefit that comes from trial lawyers’ discovery processes, I have to wonder about the ethics of a person who told Robert Smith, “You may be entitled to compensation from Merck!” Scorched earth, indeed.
Gil Roth
Editor
Maybe (?) it’s dweebish to take pride in being able to help put on a good pharmaceutical outsourcing conference, but it’s an awfully good feeling when an event works out as well this one has.
The first day of the event is the more stressful one: We had 130 companies at the one-day tabletop exhibition and more than 300 attendees in the house for the conference sessions (between sessions, we had events in the exhibit hall, so the attendees could learn about the exhibitors and do business). It’s basically a four-person operation, with some day-of-show help from some of our office staff.
The buildup is pretty harrowing for us, knowing that more than 500 people are on site because of the strength of the brand 0f our magazine. But the big day was a rousing success. The exhibitors were ecstatic with the quality of the leads they were getting from the attendees, while the attendees loved the presentations we put together (I take a little more pride in that part, since this was the first year I was largely responsible for organizing the presenters and topics).
Anyway, I know this is coming off as a rah-rah horn-self-tooting, but I feel awfully good about how well it all turned out. Exhibitors were seeking us out at the cocktail reception after the show, to tell us they wanted to sign up for next year’s event now. It takes months of preparation that still leaves plenty of last-minute stress, and it’s a great feeling when everyone else is happy with the results.
Now, on to Paris, for a conference about 9 bazillion times bigger than this one.
(I’ll try to post some Unrequired Reading this afternoon, when I’m home.)