Author Archives: William Looney

Planning Beyond the Petri Dish: A Pfizer Case Study

By William Looney | Published: June 29, 2011
Pfizer’s crizotinib development program combined organization, art, and science— and a large dose of unforeseen risk. The path to commercializing a breakthrough discovery is rarely a linear process. The orderly rationale of the scientific method is often overtaken by the random artistry of passion, personality, business culture, and sheer luck. Each plays a [...]
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Mining Data to Gain a Competitive Edge

By William Looney | Published: June 7, 2011
When gauging influence in oncology prescribing, membership in the “club” still counts As the cancer therapeutics space grows more crowded, the task of identifying and building productive relationships with “key influencers” has become vital to a successful launch strategy.  Like everything else in oncology, performing that task is harder today. What was once an inbred club [...]
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Whither the Market Research Function?

By William Looney | Published: May 20, 2011
PBIRG’s 50th anniversary meeting strikes a note for change—because the alternative is a drift toward organizational irrelevance It’s easy to be complacent about the harsh competitive challenges facing Big Pharma today. We all know what these challenges are, and the temptation is to address them in the abstract. As if all this complexity can be [...]
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Emerging Markets: Looking Beyond the Heady Growth Numbers

By William Looney | Published: April 27, 2011
A sweet helping of “Turkish delight” for local generic producers amounts to harsh medicine for foreign innovator firms… Emerging markets remain the ace in the card deck for big pharma seeking alternatives to the global slowdown in demand for medicines.  The “pharmerging 17” are dealing a strong hand, with a consensus for continued double-digit growth [...]
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Lives of Patients Keep Sales Reps off Life Support

By William Looney | Published: April 19, 2011
Pharm Exec’s sister conferencing unit explores the future of the US sales rep, including the implications of GSK’s new value-based compensation model Last week brought a small but dedicated group of sales professionals to a CBI conference in San Diego with a clear mandate: to rate the future of the “detail man” — dead or [...]
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