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Things are just not going well for Natick, MA-based device manufacturer Boston Scientific. Yesterday, the company announced that it lost $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter this year. The losses mainly stem from the company’s $1.73 billion settlement earlier this month with Johnson & Johnson ending a seven year patent dispute over drug-coated cardiovascular stents. Also, Boston Scientifics’ ill-advised purchase of medical device rival Guidant for $27 billion several years ago hasn’t helped matters.

The company said that it would cut as many as 1,300 jobs or 8 to 10 percent of its workforce to reduce operating expenses. Boston Scientifics’ decision to eliminate jobs follows similar moves made by several of its competitors last year. For example, last spring Medtronic, the largest device firm in the world, said it would eliminate at least 1,500 workers. In August, Minnesota rival St. Jude Medical eliminated 200 positions.

Device makers have seen their sales squeezed by safety recalls of top-selling products and cost cutting measures at hospitals because of the economic downturn. Also, new data suggest that drug-coated stents may not offer the benefits (over bare-metal stents) as previously thought. In fact, some physicians are beginning to reconsider the advantages of stents as compared with other surgical or pharmacologic interventions for certain cardiac patients.

While layoffs at medical devices manufacturers don’t come close to the massive layoffs in the pharmaceutical sector, don’t be surprised if other device manufacturers announce layoffs later this year.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

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I am attending the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in sunny Phoenix, AZ where I will be providing career development guidance to undergraduate and graduate students. Ironically, given the dismal job prospects in the life sciences industry for entry level employees, I will be giving a talk on how to find a job!  Last year's meeting in Orlando was a great one and I expect this one to be just as good.

While I am on the road, it doesn't mean that I won't be keeping track of the goings on back in my neck of the woods. To that end, Merck announced today that it will keep Schering Plough's corporate headquaters in Kenilworth, NJ open. Merck announced the decision today after closing on the $7 billion deal yesterday. This is good news for the NJ residents who currently work at the Kenilworth site. New Jersey has been extremely hard hit by all of the pharmaceutical layoffs in the past few years. Unemployment continues to rise and things will not get any better since conservative Republican Chris Christie was elected governor on Tuesday (he plans on laying off massive numbers of state employees) once he takes office in 2010.

Johnson and Johnson, on the other hand, announced that it was closing research & development facilities in Radnor and Chesterbrook, PA and consolidating those operations at the company's Spring House site. The New Brunswick, N.J., company would not say how many jobs are at those locations now or how many would remain in Spring House after the move, which is to be completed by 2012. These closure come shortly after JnJ announced earlier this week that is was elimating ca 8,200 employees or roughly seven percent of its global workforce.

Let's hope that things begin to improve soon. 

Hat tip to the Pharmalot blog!

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!

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Mark Sendak, author of the incisive EyeonFDA blog and social media enthusiast, has been keeping a watchful eye (pun intended) on the growing number of pharmaceutical companies that are adding channels and videos to YouTube. 

On his blog today, Mark reviews several new channels developed by Novartis, Johnson and Johnson, Teva, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca. While a growing number of pharmaceutical companies continue to add new channels on YouTube, Mark contends that the “success of these channels has varied greatly and several companies have obviously developed the channels without any idea of what they would like to do with them and some of the channels show obvious signs of neglect.”

To learn more about pharma’s incursion on YouTube, read Mark’s post!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Video Watching

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Twitter, the microblogging platform, is the current rage in social media. According to @Shwen, who writes the Med 2.0 Blog, it grew by 752% in 2008. Shwen is a social media enthusiast who is trying to convince the life sciences industry that Twitter and other social networks can be leveraged to improve drug development and deliver healthcare.

According to a recent post on Med. 2.0, there are currently three pharmaceutical companies that are actively using Twitter: Novartis (@novartis), Boehringer Ingelheim (@Boehringer) and Astra Zeneca (AstraZenecaUS). Also, it appears that Johnson and Johnson (@JNJcomm) launched an account last week. Tweets from @novartis and @Boehringer occur fairly regularly whereas AstraZenecaUS tweets are rare. Unlike YouTube, where pharmaceutical sponsors who create channels can regulate and control content, it is much more difficult to manage Twitter because tweets are in real time, uncensored (for the most part) and can be globally disseminated within seconds.

Despite these issues, Med 2.0’s Shwen muses “I can only imagine that more pharma companies are going to be jumping on board the Twitter-train sooner rather than later. How they use it to engage, on the other hand, is going to vary greatly from company to company. At the very least, I see companies setting up accounts as “listening posts”, but others may choose to engage, like @boehringer does in an informal manner. Whatever the case, Twitter is fast becoming the new dominant space for listening and/or engaging the life sciences community.”

Like Shwen, I believe that it a matter of time before pharma and biotech realize that they must embrace social media (in all of its various forms) to remain competitive in today’s increasingly interconnected marketplace.

For those of you who may be interested, you can follow BioJobBlog (@Biojobblog) and Biocrowd (@Biocrowd) on Twitter too!

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Twittering

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About a year ago, I was eating lunch and bunch of pharma executives were at the table next to me. I inadvertently overhead bits of their conversation and I heard the words, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube mentioned. This suggested to me that pharma was more aware of social media (and its business implications) than pharma publicly cared to admit. Pharma has been reluctant to embrace social media because of possible legal and regulatory ramifications. Nevertheless, a few companies have decided to boldly go where no pharma company has gone before—to YouTube.

The Eye on FDA blog, which is very bullish on social media, has been keeping aof pharma companies that have created channels on YouTube, the video site owned by Google. To date, Sanofi Pasteur, GSK, Abbot and JNJ have taken the YouTube plunge (see SanofiPasteurTV , GSKVision, AbbottChannel, andJNJHealth).  I suspect that pharma companies are willing to take a risk on YouTube, because unlike other social media platforms, they can disable the functionality that allows viewer to leave comments, kudos or kvetches after viewing videos. This shields the companies from unwarranted claims, misinformation about its products and negative publicity.

At present, the US Food and Drug Administration, has issued little or no guidance on the use of social media by drug makers. This means that drug makers are in uncharted territory and can experiment with social media without fear of much regulatory oversight or scrutiny.  Now that pharma has broken the social media barrier, I wonder whether MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (the hottest new social media tool at the moment) will be next. Interestingly, I learned yesterday that Novartis uses twitter and can be followed @Novartis.

Off the record conversations with MySpace representatives suggest that a number of pharmaceuticals have quietly created branded product pages on MySpace for years.  As the MySpace rep put it, how can you ignore an audience of 60 million people?  Further, Facebook’s fan pages are growing in popularity and don’t be surprise to see pharma pages begin to appear there. It will be interesting to see how pharma will incorporate social media into its business and marketing models in the future.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Video Watching!!!!!!!!

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Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd announced yesterday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an Approvable Letter for ceftobiprole, a first-in-class anti-MRSA broad-spectrum cephalosporin, for the treatment of complicated skin and skin structure infections including diabetic foot infections. Results from two Phase III studies involving 1600 patients with complicated skin and skin structure and diabetic foot infections showed that ceftobriprole was as effective and safe as other cephalosporin antibiotics.

The Approvable Letter indicates that the ceftobiprole application is approvable, subject to completion and assessment of clinical study site inspections; assessment of clinical and microbiological data provided but not yet reviewed; and further characterization of patients with diabetic foot infections. Ceftobiprole is currently being reviewed by regulatory authorities in Canada, the European Union and in Switzerland. The antibiotic is being co-developed and marketed with Johnson and Johnson.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!

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