Editors' Desk
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BioMarin Transforms Supplier M&A Into Joint Ventures
4/25/2016
To navigate supplier and CMO consolidation, Isaac Young, senior director, supply chain operations, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc., offers some advice: Approach your outsourcing relationships like joint ventures. “As you have this greater engagement between two companies,” says Young, “you’re likely to enter an interdependent relationship. Why not acknowledge that rather than try to power-play or position one another?”
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Amgen Looks To Air And Auto For Advice
4/11/2016
There are roughly 38,000 components that go into building a commercial airplane; in the automotive industry, it’s about 13,000 to build a car. “That requires just a little bit of coordination,” says Rodney MacLea of Amgen. If companies in those industries effectively manage much larger supply chains, why can’t pharma improve its performance? MacLea and Amgen set out to find out.
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4 Questions From The PDA Annual Meeting
4/8/2016
A few weeks back I attended the 2016 PDA Annual Meeting held in San Antonio. In general, the main thrust of the conference focused on the technologies and approaches being applied by biopharma manufacturers as they move their therapies from development through commercialization.
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The New Leadership Marketing
3/31/2016
Marketing today centers on the demonstration of active leadership and its promotion. Executive Editor Louis Garguilo describes this as “leadership marketing,” and says it's a step beyond what has become a stagnant “thought leadership.” He also puts value in a name, and thinks large conferences don’t fit this new age.
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Genentech Speaks The Language Of CMOs
3/28/2016
Todd Mabe, head of External Quality, Biologics Drug Substance for Genentech, knows his company has an inherent advantage when contracting for biologics production capacity. “It’s fair to say we’re a popular customer target,” he explains. But that doesn’t make the selection process a walk in the park.
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Biogen’s Outsourcing Trifold For Joint Value Creation
3/22/2016
Purposeful segmentation, descriptive scorecards and matrixes, and CMO governance, form a trifold of strategic relationship management for Biogen’s supply chain, says Thomas Holmes, senior director for Global External Manufacturing.
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In Outsourcing, Genzyme Sees An Advantage
3/16/2016
Regarding the outsourcing of biologics manufacturing, Piet Houwen of Sanofi says, “Starting from today, where I’d say the market relationship is sixty percent driven by the sellers, I believe we’ll see a change to a move in the direction of the sponsors.”
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Is The Virtual Biotech Model In Jeopardy?
3/10/2016
It appeared we were coasting uninterrupted to a global outsourcing industry fully able to support a wide variety of virtual business models and strategies. But conversations with executives at established biotechs reveal an unfolding reality.
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Could Value-Based Pricing Be Yet Another Roadblock To Biosimilar Uptake?
3/3/2016
As pay-for-performance drugs becomes more high-profile in the U.S., these emerging deals pose a number of difficulties for reference makers. But if pay-for-performance becomes more wide-spread, could innovators' successes become yet another roadblock to getting biosimilars into doctor's treatment repertoire and patients' hands?
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At Biogen, Three Keys To Outsourcing
3/2/2016
Thomas Holmes, senior director for Global External Manufacturing, Biogen, says: (a) cost is not the strategic driver in CMO selection; (b) “dual sourcing” is revenue independent; and (c) the time from drug approval to market launch is all of 48 to 72 hours.