Shrinking Merck

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Anonymous

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Pfizer is trying to divest 40% of its holding and reworking its R&D model to extract more from academic research (e.g. building Centers of Therapeutic Innovation, CTI) and leveraging external discoveries by buying more aggressively successful start-ups and small biotechs. Would that model work for Merck?
 


















Anonymous said:
Pfizer is trying to divest 40% of its holding and reworking its R&D model to extract more from academic research (e.g. building Centers of Therapeutic Innovation, CTI) and leveraging external discoveries by buying more aggressively successful start-ups and small biotechs. Would that model work for Merck?
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I interviewed at CTI last month. Very interesting concept, I think they're onto something. More than just another effort to leverage academic knowledge, IMO.
 






Merck has followed pfizers lead for the last 15 years, right into the abyss.
That strategy of buying biotechs and leveraging academic research is nothing new and has never produced anything of substance.

There's only one way to get Merck out of this mess...homegrown R&D. That worked great for us for 50+ years. We need to get back to it. Forget pfizer, they're going to sink faster than anyone with that strategy.
 






Anonymous said:
Merck has followed pfizers lead for the last 15 years, right into the abyss.
That strategy of buying biotechs and leveraging academic research is nothing new and has never produced anything of substance.

There's only one way to get Merck out of this mess...homegrown R&D. That worked great for us for 50+ years. We need to get back to it. Forget pfizer, they're going to sink faster than anyone with that strategy.
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It didn't work for the last 10 years.

It worked for Roy Vagelos because he did something novel then that nobody else did, that is 100% focus on new drug discovery based on defined molecular targets and top notch biochemistry, enzymology in particular. Nowadays everyone and his brother have what Roy had. Merck lost its edge, and at the same time it completely missed the boat on the emergence of biologics (excluding vaccine) as a strong section of the market. Besides vaccines it had nothing to show for 30 years when others cashed in. Yeah! Buying Schering got them interferon and anti TNF antibodies, still contested by J&J.

Pfizer recognized its failure in the M&A strategy, which included home grown R&D. You need more than home grown, you need to extract efficiently innovations in drug discovery from the whole world. You may be able to beat them once, but beating them all the time ain't real.

Get rid of the current R&D team and replace it with folks who are more forward thinking and wise. The current team is plain dumb and always too busy shuffling colorful Power Point slides instead of really working on innovations. Science and innovation are not manufactured in the board room with lawyers and MBA's, try the lab bench instead. If you can gather enough innovations then buy from others for commercial development.
 






Anonymous said:
I interviewed at CTI last month. Very interesting concept, I think they're onto something. More than just another effort to leverage academic knowledge, IMO.
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Oh me too! Pfizer hit hard rock bottom already and is trying to recover. May be we will be safer there than at Merck. Merck is on its way to the bottom or into oblivion, with the kind of leadership they have in research.
 






Current MRL leadership only concerns themselves with the things that preserve their empire. "Innovation" is not a word I have heard spoken from them, outside of the lip service.
 






Merck has shrunk far more than anyone realizes. The multiple "optimizations", the SP merger and the many small acquisitions have been an effort to hide the real headcount reduction. With all of the change and reassignments, it tempered the appearance of what was actually more severe a reduction than anyone could appreciate. The mass push to make reps and managers unhappy enough to quit is the other side of the axe that isn't acknowledged by the managerial debris that "leads" us. It sickens me to think of some of the GREAT reps that left us voluntarily, only to leave our turd of a manager behind.
 












Anonymous said:
Merck has shrunk far more than anyone realizes. The multiple "optimizations", the SP merger and the many small acquisitions have been an effort to hide the real headcount reduction. With all of the change and reassignments, it tempered the appearance of what was actually more severe a reduction than anyone could appreciate. The mass push to make reps and managers unhappy enough to quit is the other side of the axe that isn't acknowledged by the managerial debris that "leads" us. It sickens me to think of some of the GREAT reps that left us voluntarily, only to leave our turd of a manager behind.
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If they are buying silly new companies and laying off at the same time, it sounds like the status quo to me. Do you have the current headcount? At any rate I have the impression Merck is shrinking the talent pool while keeping crony executives who are more busy fattening up their pay checks and bonuses. The pipeline is still a disaster with major bread earners going off patents and nothing to replace. What are they doing in the discovery area? Pouring money into a blackhole?
 






Anonymous said:
What everyone suspects is true but nobody wants to say is said at
www.eyesopen.com/en/blog/what-is-really-killing-pharma.
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Excellent rant from Anthony Nicholls. Hope his business is doing well. He must be! Pharmas big and small are investing heavily in computational chemistry and structure-guided drug design, but I can't say the same for Merck. I remember hearing a seminar from a very high level senior Merck chemist privately saying afterwards that structure-guided design and computation methods are nice accessories but they never really needed. Intuition alone is good enough. X-ray structures are just good for shows and publications when all is done. Oh well, now we know why Merck pipeline sucks nowadays, all promises but nothing on the market except perhaps the loot from Schering-Plough.
 






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