When the rot set in at Mdx
I'm a former employee of MDx and follow the occasional posts on here out of morbid curiosity.
To my mind there were at least three contributing events to the state that this division finds itself in today:
1. Lack of long term planning: This has been referred to in many other posts, but specifically I recall a time just when Amersham had been acquired, when they were looking at the 10 year forecasts, which included Visipaque and various pipeline product early revenues. It was clear then that you had to be wildly optimistic about the success rate of R&D (any biotech R&D, not just the shambolic organization run by BC then DB) to include the majority of development projects as revenue earners. To the new GE owners, this was new territory and they did not question that first S1 submission from Mdx. Also there was an assumption that the fantastic and out-of-trend growth of contrast media would continue. Finally there was no consideration of life cycle management and how developing competitive claims would maintain this growth. Subsequently the forecasts for Visipaque were underpinned by lifecycle plans that were never funded or delivered. What a house of cards! When the forecasts showed a dip in division revenues before new products took over (in the later part of the 10 year plan) JH and colleagues chose to ignore the 10 year timeframe and just take a 3 year standard S1 snapshot... amazing ignorance of how pharma product life cycles and investment plans work. This willingness on the part of the legacy Amersham leadership to accept the short-termism of their GE overlords was sort of understandable given how little their new owners new about pharma. Myoview's patent expiration, a perfectly predictable event, still managed to come as a surprise to DP's replacement, JC (more of him later!)
2. Calamitous disaster management: When safety issues relating to Omniscan first appeared, the leading KOL who raised the concerns, based in Scandinavia, was largely ignored. Only when the firestorm built (possibly as a result of said KOL being tended by local management and feeling ignored) did DP and others start to realize what kind of issue was brewing. Right throughout the Omniscan crisis, MDx personnel were chasing the fire. Meanwhile a double digit percentage of revenue had gone and the reputation of the division among MR imaging customers took a beating, never mind the potentially awful human cost for the small number of patients who suffered.
3. R&D mismanagement: Amersham's R&D effort was always a little strange. Massively overstaffed at the time of the acquisition, at least there was an attempt to align R&D spend with commercial opportunity. However, continued delays, poor project management and fickle judgement meant that every time there was a portfolio review, there was always some f__kup to hide and a culture of sandbagging ensued. Then came the utterly reprehensible deceitful cronyism of the DB era. Even portfolio reviews were abandoned and financial accountability disappeared. What was striking was that all the tough love JC showed in rooting out costs and improving infrastructure and operations counted for little while 10% of his revenue was being pissed down the drain by DB. And JC never did a damn thing about it. Consequently Mdx has not launched one new product in over ten years (unless you count Datscan, a product approved over 10 years ago in Europe and only just approved in the US last year) and now secures the bulk of its profit from a market commoditized by the loss of patent of several brands with little market growth in prospect.
So this is a longwinded summary of at least three things that I suggest would account for the state of that business today. What on earth PW could have done about this I don't know. Rigor Mortis was setting in as she took over the reins. I genuinely don't believe BC thought that this would happen and would not see him as having sought to "get out while the going was good" It just happened that way.
