The reason why the Novartis Board pushed Vasella out because his vision for the future for Novartis missed a chance to really effect the long term future for Novartis. Not only has the failure of his multi-billion $ gamble to improve new product development with NIBR but a spectacular blunder but his has missed the boat in the part of the value stream the comes next - manufacturing or in Pharma speak "tech Ops".
Not so for our competitors though . . .
Biotech Firms in Race for Manufacturing Breakthrough
"Two leading biotechnology companies are competing to be the first to implement cheaper, faster processes for producing drugs inside living cells, making it easier to manufacture human proteins, antibodies, and other medications.
The new approaches will be “disruptively different” says Robert Bradway, the CEO of Amgen, one of the companies pursuing a manufacturing breakthrough. Today’s systems for producing drugs in bacterial or animal cells and then isolating them are hugely expensive and can take months. With more efficient processes in place, companies could swiftly increase production of drugs in high demand, and they could produce medicines for rare diseases more cost-effectively as well.
Amgen, of Thousand Oaks, California, the largest biotech company in the United States, has been mostly quiet on the subject of its manufacturing ideas since May, when Bradway, also its president and board chairman, announced during a lecture at MIT that he believes we are “on the cusp of a major change in how we manufacture proteins.” An Amgen spokesperson declined to elaborate on the technology.
But its competitor, Genzyme, acknowledges the urgent effort to develop new methods. “There’s a race going on,” says Konstantin Konstantinov, vice president for late-stage product development at the company, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re trying to come up with the dominant design.
At Genzyme, a subsidiary of French drug giant Sanofi, Konstantinov leads a team pursuing an idea called continuous manufacturing. The switch from inflexible “batch” production processes to continuous ones has already wrought huge changes in other industries. Steelmakers, which used to mold molten metal into individual ingots, achieved a transformative jump in efficiency when they made the transition to extruding steel bars."
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509336/biotech-firms-in-race-for-manufacturing-breakthrough/
Not so for our competitors though . . .
Biotech Firms in Race for Manufacturing Breakthrough
"Two leading biotechnology companies are competing to be the first to implement cheaper, faster processes for producing drugs inside living cells, making it easier to manufacture human proteins, antibodies, and other medications.
The new approaches will be “disruptively different” says Robert Bradway, the CEO of Amgen, one of the companies pursuing a manufacturing breakthrough. Today’s systems for producing drugs in bacterial or animal cells and then isolating them are hugely expensive and can take months. With more efficient processes in place, companies could swiftly increase production of drugs in high demand, and they could produce medicines for rare diseases more cost-effectively as well.
Amgen, of Thousand Oaks, California, the largest biotech company in the United States, has been mostly quiet on the subject of its manufacturing ideas since May, when Bradway, also its president and board chairman, announced during a lecture at MIT that he believes we are “on the cusp of a major change in how we manufacture proteins.” An Amgen spokesperson declined to elaborate on the technology.
But its competitor, Genzyme, acknowledges the urgent effort to develop new methods. “There’s a race going on,” says Konstantin Konstantinov, vice president for late-stage product development at the company, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re trying to come up with the dominant design.
At Genzyme, a subsidiary of French drug giant Sanofi, Konstantinov leads a team pursuing an idea called continuous manufacturing. The switch from inflexible “batch” production processes to continuous ones has already wrought huge changes in other industries. Steelmakers, which used to mold molten metal into individual ingots, achieved a transformative jump in efficiency when they made the transition to extruding steel bars."
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509336/biotech-firms-in-race-for-manufacturing-breakthrough/