Blog of Osler

June 13, 2009

Here is a blog on that very same subject about Dr. Vasella. I'm sure he is

rich by anyone's imagination if he can collect first-edition works of Sigmund

Freud.

This was written by OslerJune 12, 2009. Novartis takes on a different

approach others in the pharmaceutical industry. Rich, yes that we cannot deny,

but it takes a lot of money to pay the scientists who do the research. He

prefers to do research for rare diseases that others have no real interest in.

Well aren't we all glad that he did, or we probalby wouldn't have Gleevec. How

many care about the 4500 patients who develop CML in a year. Our lives would be

far different from what it is today. Even if Gleevec wasn't able to save

everyone who took it, it certainly saved the majority of people who have. See

what Osler has to say about Pros and Cons:

" Vasella's career has been extraordinary. To go from being a practicing

physician, without any record of original research work, to a pharmaceutical

marketing job because of a perception that it would be easier to rapidly obtain

a leadership role in the latter is amazingly presumptuous - that doesn't happen

in pharma. Oh, but Dan had a patron - his wifes uncle was the Chairman - so he

obviously knew that this was going to happen.

" Then Ciba and Sandoz merged - the drug pipeline came from Ciba and the

management came from Sandoz - interesting! The recent success of Novartis has

been in oncology - of which Dan knows essentially nothing. Dan's clinical

practice was gastroenterology and internal medicine. His expertise in managing

drug development can be assessed by the recent Novartis drugs in these areas -

Prexige (arthritis), Zelnorm (irritable bowel syndrome) and Galvus (diabetes) -

amazingly all three were management debacles!!! To mention Dan in the same

breath as Jobs, Grove and Walton is ridiculous and shows that this article did

not seek input from anyone who understands the realities of drug development. "

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