The Soul of Biotech

Today, I’m attending Burrill & Company’s Pacific Northwest Life Sciences Meeting, and will try to throw up a few live blogs while I’m here. This morning, Burrill’s CEO is currently presenting a state of affairs of the industry. All in all, a good summary of the industry. Mr. Burrill had a lot of ground to cover in only an hour, and I think he may not have had a chance to go into as much depth as I would have enjoyed, which is too bad. A quick summary of the points so far (and my thoughts in parentheses).

* blockbuster model switching to personalized medicine (sure)
* biotech is beating pharma in return to shareholders (a myth in my view — taking out AMGN and DNA, biotech hasn’t been a particularly good bet for shareholders — and most biotech vs pharma graphs don’t include the myriad failed private biotechs)
* biofuels are booming (the investments are booming, and it is a ferociously cool idea that I hope works eventually, but my understanding is that nobody has gone carbon-negative yet, and there are serious roadblocks in this technology at present)
* costs are going up because people are living longer (yes, and managed care is transferring cost and risk away as efficiently as it can, which is shaping how people seek care for themselves)
* prescription drugs are only ~10% of health care costs, far from the major driver they are usually painted as (great point, great insight)
* R&D productivity is going down — the famous R&D spending vs NME’s graph — and it is attributable to the FDA’s new attitude toward risk (agree, but I think that druggable targets are also harder to find than they used to be, and the low-hanging fruit have been eaten)
* big companies can’t innovate (I think that an intelligently designed organization can do it — I was impressed by Garnier’s recent article in HBR about GSK’s R&D redesign, and I wonder if it’s working)
* heading to rational drug design by 2020 due to pharmacogenomics (RDD will require substantial advances in systems biology first, not just pharmacogenomics)
* lots happening in China (agree — IP protection policy will determine the future of biotech there)
* FIPCO replaced by VIPCO (yes — sort of. I think VIPCOs will work better when there is a low degree of informational asymmetry between partners. That means situations where the product’s mechanism or technology is familiar to the licensor. FIPCOs will be a better plan for companies with truly novel technologies, because they will get better product support from within than without.)

We’ve got the final cut of the Social Bonding talk from the BIL 2008 “unconference” up on YouTube!

Many thanks to:

• Robert Scoble at Fast Company for the initial rough cut from his cell phone.
• Brian over at Hostile Fork for taking the first part of the video
• Matt Knopp for putting it together with Scoble’s video.

Watch part 1 here and part 2 here.

I’m writing this post live at BIL! Prof. Daniel Frank from Stanford University has just concluded his talk called, “Stem Cells: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.” Brilliant guy, and an aircraft pilot as well! I’m skipping out on some lunch to give my thoughts from this weekend.

BIL has been a tremendous experience for me. Lexi and I have already received lots of positive feedback from BILders who saw our talk on Saturday morning — and even from a few TEDsters who only heard about it. One TEDster, after I explained the entire talk to her after dinner at Montrio, said that our talk was as important as any technological venture. (Wow.) But more gratifying were the people that approached Lexi and I to say that our talk was highly memorable and helped them reexamine their own approaches to social interaction. Which was our goal all along.

Some bits of yesterday’s talk:
* A very rough video of the Social Bonding talk can be seen here, courtesy of Robert Scoble. We’ll get a better version onto the web soon.
* The deck for our talk can be seen here, but it won’t mean much without the two of us standing in front of it.
* A great shot of me delivering the fourth point.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to connect with leaders of several small new companies that I admire, including Allied Strategy, Replicus, Business Genome Project, Naviscribe, and Halcyon Molecular. Hearing about new business ideas is always fun, and for all of these companies (especially Replicus and Halcyon), if their execution is successful, I predict you’ll be reading about them for a long long time.

My talk starts in half an hour, at 11:45am Pacific time. If you see this in time, you can watch the webcast live right here!

BIL is a new kind of science and technology conference, set up as a more egalitarian cousin to TED. My close friend Lexi Bright, who writes over at Sophisticated Relationships persuaded me to join her in delivering a presentation on the topic of person-to-person networking to the attendees of BIL. (I love speaking in front of groups — she didn’t have to try very hard.)

Anyone who knows me personally is nodding, because they know how enthusiastic I am about meeting someone new and learning all about him or her. When I was a sophomore at MIT, my friend Brian joked, “Jonathan, you’re the one that makes that whole ’six degrees of separation’ thing work.” Later, Malcolm Gladwell would identify me as a ‘connector’. Who knew.

I’m still trying to figure out what parts to emphasize in the talk. Last night, I showed up at Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne for Ignite Portland, but it was already over capacity. So I walked down the street and ended up having a bite at My Thai, discussing the topic of my talk with my waitress, Emily, as I dug into my massamun curry. Emily graduated from Skidmore last year and drove out to Portland from New York this summer with her old housemates. Now she teaches grade school in Gresham by day and waits tables by night.

Emily and I talked about the nature of networking for a while — she says we shouldn’t use the word, because it gives her the willies. And I know what she means. When we think “networking,” we think of dryly exchanging cards, with the “lower status” person trying to get time on the calendar of the other in order to pitch his product, company, or employability. She suggested that we make sure to divorce the word from its usual meaning and reunite it with the idea of being open, honest and sincere with others. This sounded spot-on with my own interpretation of networking, and I’ll be sure to emphasize it in our talk.

Lexi and I are still writing the talk as we speak, and suggestions are welcome. So tell me what you think. Keeping in mind that the audience will be primarily technically-oriented, what should Lexi and I emphasize in our talk? What should geeks know about talking to strangers?

Boy, it’s been a long time since I wrote.

I finished my training in December, and at the turn of the new year, I finally hit the road to meet my doctors and talk product. I wish I could talk specifically about the fascinating interactions I’ve had with my physicians, but I can’t for confidentiality reasons. I can at least talk a bit about the rep experience, which has been tough but rewarding.

Last week, I came up with the perfect analogy for being a new rep: It’s like being transferred to a new school. At first, you don’t know where the classrooms are. No one knows who you are, so they aren’t especially interested in talking to you. You’re nervous, so you drop your books a couple of times. Your jokes aren’t funny, but you’re nervous so you laugh at them yourself. That sort of thing.

Things get better the same way they do in high school. You make a few friends, they actually laugh at your jokes, and eventually things get better, and before you know it, other people are glad you’re there. In the meantime, you do your homework conscientiously, ask good questions, and try to get your grades up as quickly as possible.

[Of course, it also helps when your big sister (aka partner) gets straight A’s, is as popular as the prom queen, and is kind enough to point the way.]

I’ve got my nose in binders and CD-ROMs about treatments for psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, so I won’t be able to write quite as lengthy posts as I’d like, at least until I get my feet under me in my new role.

Recently, however, a news item passed my virtual desk that I couldn’t resist writing about. Novartis is running a YouTube contest, called FluFlix. In brief, the contest is designed to encourage aspiring filmmakers to create ads about the flu. It’s reminiscent of Doritos’ Crash the Superbowl contest, which, by the way, ended up creating a great ad.

Novartis’ investment in this is appears to be trivial. In fact, given the tiny prize and fall timing, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this is an MBA intern’s project on non-personal promotion. [Non-personal promotion refers to the promotion of a product without using a rep.] Nevertheless, NPP is a hot topic in the industry, so I’m guessing that other pharma companies are watching to see how Novartis’ experiment pans out.

Given the emergence of “Web 2.0 media” like YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, one wonders what a more interactive version of pharmaceutical DTC marketing could look like. Will drug brands get their own Facebook groups and Myspace profiles? We as consumers already know that we often prefer one pain reliever over another. Could we start to see consumers identify themselves with Advil over Tylenol the way that they prefer Nike to Adidas? It isn’t a big leap to imagine many over-the-counter drugs being marketed the same way sports drinks are. Although I highly doubt that it would make sense for any therapy but the most commonplace, teenagers and young adults have formed tight allegiances to brands on less.

On Friday afternoon, I formally accepted an offer to transfer into the Enbrel Derm sales force, serving in the Portland, Oregon territory. Relocation timing and details are still pending, but I’ll probably get up there by October or so.

I’m incredibly excited to learn how to sell effectively. Both my district manager and regional director have vast reservoirs of sales experience within Amgen, so I’m confident that I’ll learn a great deal from the feet of a couple of masters.

Plus, this will be an enormous personal adventure. I don’t know a single person in Portland. In fact, I’ve never set foot in Oregon in my life. And I can’t wait to find out what’s waiting for me when I get there.

(So far, people tell me: “beer,” “rain,” and “hipsters.”)

From Episode 1×14 of Sports Night:
Isaac: “Thanks, this won’t take long. There’s gonna be a piece in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. Don’t worry about it. (BEAT) That’s all.”

Yes, I still have my job. Furthermore, there’s no rationale (barring the sale of Amgen to a competitor) by which I would not continue to have my job. By now, you’ve probably read all about Amgen’s planned layoffs and cutbacks. While I’m obviously not thrilled about it, I understand why we need to cut expense growth in light of the finalized CMS ruling, which impacts our expected revenue growth. It stinks, of course. The news has affected morale a little bit. Some who sense that their jobs are potentially vulnerable have been wondering whether or not to start planning for a transition. Others have already begun to look for other opportunities “just in case.” Still, I’ve continued to be impressed by the strength and transparency of management near me, up through to the VP level.

In one respect, however, I am disappointed. What I have found to be conspicuously absent from Kevin Sharer’s messages to the workforce is any indication that he or the other executives are willing to share in the pain being experienced by those whose jobs are at risk. In Jim Collins’ Good to Great, Collins points to a “culture of discipline” present in great companies — it is a culture in which members of top-level management forgo luxuries in order to set an example for the rest of the firm. For example, at Nucor, a large steel company, workers’ pay was cut 25 percent during the 1982 recession. Executive salaries, however, were slashed by 60 percent, and the CEO himself took a 75 percent pay cut. By “feeling the pain,” rather than distancing themselves from it, executives demonstrate that they share in the entire company’s reality. Indeed, a recent Scientific American article suggests that the leaders who position themselves among the group rather than above it have generally proven to be most effective.

Kevin made over $34 million in compensation last year, placing 24th on Forbes’ 2006 list of most highly-paid CEOs. Although 2006 was a stellar year for the company, I would imagine that Kevin’s 2007 compensation will still be fairly generous. I wouldn’t ask Kevin or any of his team to take a pay cut without a better idea of the big picture. In fact, I sincerely believe that his senior team deserves healthy compensation for their difficult and important jobs. I simply hope that Kevin is not missing an opportunity to win the loyalty of the workforce by actively participating in the cutbacks and setting an example for the rest of us.