How Many?













Wow! And here I felt alone in pondering that very same question; you must be knowledgeable about Xigris to make the connection. How did you come to that realization - what was your role here in the molecule?
 






Wow! And here I felt alone in pondering that very same question; you must be knowledgeable about Xigris to make the connection. How did you come to that realization - what was your role here in the molecule?

OP here. I was one of the original Critical Care reps that launched Xigris. I stuck it out for three years before I could not take it any more and moved on. The entire Xigris debacle would make an excellent book, but it will likley never be written, as the powerful insiders who bungled pretty much every aspect of the drug after the PROWESS trial are loathe to speak candidly.
 












OP here. I was one of the original Critical Care reps that launched Xigris. I stuck it out for three years before I could not take it any more and moved on. The entire Xigris debacle would make an excellent book, but it will likley never be written, as the powerful insiders who bungled pretty much every aspect of the drug after the PROWESS trial are loathe to speak candidly.

Self-reflection, admission of mistakes, and/or challenging anyone above your pay grade are not the sort of leadership behaviors we encourage here.
 


















Two of my favorite quotes:

"We launched Prozac, I think we know what we're doing."

"You are not going to sell this product. The peer to peer programs are going to sell this product."
 






OP here. I was one of the original Critical Care reps that launched Xigris. I stuck it out for three years before I could not take it any more and moved on. The entire Xigris debacle would make an excellent book, but it will likley never be written, as the powerful insiders who bungled pretty much every aspect of the drug after the PROWESS trial are loathe to speak candidly.

This may have been before your time, but I especially enjoyed the FDA Advisory Board Meeting where an elderly gentleman got up during the public comments section, ranting against the molecule but without any coherent criticisms of the clinical studies, explaining:

"... it's like pornography, hard to define it, but you know it when you see it."​

I'm assuming you believed in the drug, but disagreed with execution of both Marketing Strategy and the design of required Phase IV (open label) Clinical Trial?
 












So, Elaine Sorg; who else?

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

Another great ES story: shortly after the drug was launched she rode with me in the field, as my area had some of the best sales at the time. At the end of the day she asked what we in the field needed, in terms of verbatims, in order to effectively sell Xigris. I explained to her that this was not the kind of drug that could be sold with verbatims, and that we needed to have high level technical dialogs with our customers. You should have seen the look in her eyes. She had absolutely no clue.
 






This may have been before your time, but I especially enjoyed the FDA Advisory Board Meeting where an elderly gentleman got up during the public comments section, ranting against the molecule but without any coherent criticisms of the clinical studies, explaining:

"... it's like pornography, hard to define it, but you know it when you see it."​

I'm assuming you believed in the drug, but disagreed with execution of both Marketing Strategy and the design of required Phase IV (open label) Clinical Trial?

I still believe in Xigris. But outside of the PROWESS trial, everything that Lilly did was pretty much a disaster. They just could not understand that selling a drug made with recombinant DNA technology for sepsis was not the same as selling Prozac.
 


















Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Did ES say that?

Seriously, as I recall, according to the PROWESS data the reduction in mortality with Xigris was 6%. That would translate to about 60,000 people who died from covid in this country alone surviving their infection. Worldwide, the numbers would be much larger.

Way to go, Lilly!
 












Thank you for posting this. It looks like covid usually kills patients due to viral sepsis.

I still cannot believe how badly Lilly effed up everything about Xigris, except for the PROWESS trial.