The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma by Barry Werth

Author:Barry Werth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Retail, Vertex, Nonfiction, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781451655667
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Scott Brown’s startling Senate victory burst through the halls of Congress and across America. The political center of gravity lurched rightward. “Tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,” Brown told his cheering supporters. Kennedy had called overhauling the health care system “the cause of my life.” Now the state would send a Republican to Washington to try to kill it. Losing their supermajority, Democrats scrambled to salvage Obama’s bill. PhRMA and BIO both backed the measure, the big drug companies having made a deal with the White House to block any effort in Congress to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion, and BIO having inserted a provision to create an accelerated pathway for the FDA to license so-called biosimilars that were interchangeable with branded biologics.

Wysenski had twelve months to build a national commercial organization equipped to go head-to-head against Merck. Absorbing Schering’s clinical and marketing muscle in hepatitis C gave Merck an initial advantage in the market, where the Schering team already knew and had contracts with nearly all the key opinion leaders (KOLs) in liver diseases and gastroenterology, and had friendly relations and well-established channels across the reimbursement landscape. Conceptually, designing an organization requires figuring out what your goals and priorities are, and then reverse-engineering from that what it will take to be successful. With the sharply reduced market expansion forecast, Wysenski now had reasonable goals for the launch and beyond. With a small team, she started to devise a framework.

“There are three buckets,” she explains. “A strategy drives people, process, and technology. That’s what I assessed, and that’s exactly what I took to the board. I said, ‘I’ve looked at the people, and we’ve got great middle-level management, but I’ve got to hire around that. It’s not that they’re not good, it’s just that they’ve never done the lead roles, so I’ve got to supplement that because we can’t fail.’ You couldn’t worry about people being a little bruised, because you had to make this happen for the company.”

Wysenski fleshed out her proposal to the board. There were five core technology systems that Vertex would need to be ready to go on Day One. She identified the five key positions and the talent she would need. She also spelled out the processes by which everything would come together—“the operations, the policies, the infrastructure, the organizational structure you create”—and, with the help of one of Murcko’s hires, created a program management system to track what was getting done. As spring approached, with Emmens’s blessing and the board’s support, Wysenski dove into delivering on her plan to turn Vertex into an operating company.

“I immediately started aggressively recruiting on what I thought were the most important three critical jobs: sales, managed markets, head of marketing for HCV,” she says. “I also met with the CF team and told them, ‘Please don’t take it personally, but it looks like from a distance you’re doing a great job. Just keep doing it; I’ll be back in about six months.

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