As the Lilly ceo heads toward retirement, he gave a little talk at the Wharton School of Business about the issues confronting the pharmaceutical industry. There was apparently no mention of Zyprexa or marketing issues, in general, because all that is the subject of litigation. Why risk time-consuming depositions when so many stock options are waiting?

But Sid did opine about the future. “I believe that the years ahead will amount to revolution much more than evolution,” he said during his keynote address at the recent 2008 Wharton Health Care Business Conference. “It will not happen overnight, but we are already moving toward the barricades and headed toward a new business model.”

Drugmakers, he offered, will move away from blockbusters and instead focus on highly individualized solutions for patients, which is generally called personalized medicine, although Sid prefers “tailored therapeutics.” To him, this is a larger concept that encompasses the many different types of personalized approaches to medicine. “A good tailor’s abilities go well beyond alteration,” he said. “The custom-made suit is his ultimate creation.”

And he maintained targeted treatments have the potential to increase repeat prescriptions, as opposed to the current trend away from repeat prescriptions due to the lack of efficacy, according a Wharton summary. Tailoring also bodes well for reducing costs and thus contributing to the bottom line. “The net result of sales can be quite virile. Instead of getting a relatively small slice of a large pie, the tailored model promises a larger share of a more segmented pie.”

Sid doesn’t address safety issues, but his comments sound similar to recent remarks by another outgoing ceo, Glaxo’s JP Garnier: “The development of new chemical entities and new biologicals is going to change. One way is to slice the patient populations, not to try to put the drug on the market for all the patients that could benefit, but focus on the easiest slice, the ones where they would be the least amount of controversy from a safety efficacy standpoint.”