New 2011 Webinar Series to Educate, Enhance and Empower Life Sciences Professionals

We have just launched our 2011 webinar series to educate, enhance and empower life sciences professionals. Webinar topics range from how to position for optimal capital raising, successfully commercializing products, picking the right growth targets, optimizing clinical trials, heightening R&D productivity, advancing in a shifting job market, creating a workforce strategy, and more.

Each of the webinars addresses how to respond to different critical issues in life sciences to become more efficient and effective. Attendees will range from clinical research professionals to broad leadership executives.

The first of the 13 webinars in the series, titled “Dynamics in the Life Science Industry: The Tsunami in Full Swing,” begins on March 10. This webinar will examine the state of the industry, the implications for changes as well as methodologies and leading practices to improvement.

“Many in life sciences understand the challenges that continue to plague our industry, as well as those that lie ahead,” said Advanced Clinical Executive Vice President Rosemarie Truman, a 19-year strategy veteran and chief presenter of the series. “From the economic crisis, globalization, new business models, the transition to personalized medicine and Health Care Reform, life sciences professionals have experienced massive disturbances, further strained by numerous quick fixes. This series will offer information and solutions to show life sciences professionals how to effectively respond to these challenges to achieve sustainability.”

Online registration is now open. Webinars are offered to participants at no cost, with the exception of one for which contact hours may be earned. Interested attendees can register online at advancedclinical.com/webinars.

Big Pharma aims for reinvention

With some of his most profitable medicines going off patent, and the uncertainty of replacement drugs continuing to rise, US healthcare reform has been the least of Andrew Witty’s recent worries.

When the chief executive of GlaxoSmith­Kline presented his company’s most recent financial results last month, he gave a sense of how the UK’s biggest drugmaker – and the industry more generally – is responding to structural pressures: diversify to survive.

For his company, he says, this means a shift away from “white pills in western markets”, with the proportion of traditionally core patent-protected, chemically based drugs, which are sold mainly in North America and western Europe, falling to just more than a quarter of total sales.

For many years, large companies such as GSK have relied on a handful of typically high-priced, mass-market “blockbusters” that generate billions of dollars a year in sales. But as patents expire on drugs such as Lipitor, Pfizer’s anti-cholesterol medicine that is the biggest selling medication in history, big pharma is having to rethink its business model.

Most large pharmaceutical companies have adopted four principal strategies to diversify. First, expand the range of products in the research and development pipeline and the use of external as well as in-house scientists to discover them. Second, expand geographically, especially into emerging markets. Third, increase sales of products other than patented prescription medicines. Fourth, experiment with greater flexibility in pricing in different countries and with ways to ensure drugs provide value for money.

Read the rest of the article -- FinancialTimes.com

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