Sanofi’s Viehbacher Hunts For Brains In Boston
1 CommentBy Ed Silverman // November 11th, 2009 // 8:20 am
The Sanofi-Aventis ceo made the equivalent of a sales pitch yesterday to some 200 guests in Cambridge, Ma., yesterday in a bid to attract what he called partners for innovation. The notion is nothing new in big pharma, where drugmakers are turning over rocks to find new compounds to exploit.
But Chris Viehbacher wanted to make the sales call himself to Boston’s biotech community. And so he talked up plans to start a venture capital fund and strike more partnerships that yield what he called “the right brain activity.”
“We all know there is a patent cliff in this industry, and it goes from 2012 to 2014,” he explained, according to Xconomy.com. “But my goal isn’t just to fill a sales gap.”
“We’re starting to learn to work with others, to play nicely together. There are going to be limits to what we can do as a big company,” he told the crowd, according to The Boston Globe. “The traditional model of bricks and mortar has gone the way of the Dodo bird.”
Anne PME
“The traditional model of bricks and mortar has gone the way of the Dodo bird.”
My guess is that Medco and Express Scripts are already familiar with and feel the same way about retail ( i.e. bricks and mortar) pharmacy as Sanofi’s Viehbacher feels about pharma R & D.
Maybe someone should pass along the ‘Dodo bird’ comment to CVS Caremark executives and/or major stockholders. Better yet, they could remove the word ‘dodo bird’ and substitute the words ‘ostrich with its head in the sand…’