Life Science Leader: Electronic Procurement Saves Biopharm/Medtech Companies Time
It’s 2012 and many of us have used Amazon.com and Zappos.com (and use them regularly). It might surprise you to learn that many biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies still use paper-based procurement systems. That means staff searches through stacks of catalogues or visit multiple websites for the products they need.
It doesn’t have to be that way. My Life Science Leader article on e-procurement shows how digitizing the procurement process can save time, accelerate the purchasing process, eliminate supply chain issues and help your employees spend more time creating value for your company.
The article gives a nice picture into a part of the life sciences business that most of us never think about.
Check it out here.
My Life Science Leader article How to Maximize Returns and Minimize Damage When Closing a Manufacturing Plant is a high-level, step-by-step guide to closing down a plant.
Closing the doors on a business, shutting down a manufacturing plant isn’t something any one likes to think about, but the fact is with the constant downsizings, plant closings, and mergers and acquisitions activity, billions of dollars in real estate and laboratory, manufacturing and packaging equipment gets decommissioned, redeployed or sold every year.
There is an upside to this: the used equipment industry is booming and market prices are strong. Laboratory and analytical equiopment is one of the fastest-growing categories of preowned equiopment. Manufacturing developed real estate is also hot.
Click here to learn more about this topic.
Special thanks to Matt Hicks at Federal Equipment, Matt Smith at EquipNet, Randy Small at GoIndustry DoveBid for their help on this article.
My article on how developing a strategic partnership with a clinical research organization (CRO) can drive innovation just went live over at Life Science Leader.
During the past decade, one of the most significant trends in biopharmaceutical industry has been the evolution of outsourcing relationships. The business relationships between biopharmaceutical companies and CROs has moved from a traditional project-by-project outsourcing models to strategic partnerships designed to deliver greater benefits and innovation.
What does a company gain by working with a CRO? According to Gary Laramee of King Pharmaceuticals:
The biggest CROs offer knowledge and expertise throughout the product development process. They have worked with many companies at every stage of development. They have global resources and can manage trials and recruit patients both domestically and internationally. Some even offer financing and will partner with companies.
According to Josef von Rickenbach, chairman and C.E.O. of PAREXEL, one of the world’s largest CROs,
The locus of product development process innovation has moved into the large, global CROs.
Clinical development innovation is shifting to CROs who have a tradition of delivering results on a tight budget. This makes a lot of sense for pharmaceutical companies looking to shake up their internal research and development efforts.
I really enjoyed speaking to each of the participants in the article and plan to spend more time learning how small- to medium-sized biopharmaceutical companies and start-ups can leverage the full range of innovation that CROs offer.
Surf on over to Life Science Leader to read the full article.
I just interviewed Jeff Tangney, the co-founder and C.E.O. (and co-founder of Epocrates) of the private physician network, Doximity. It’s a different take on social media for physicians and a great example of how social media is changing the practice of medicine. According to Jeff:
Doximity helps [doctors] find precision referrals. One-third of our users share their cell phone numbers on the site and select who gets access colleague by colleague. Doximity saves physicians time by maintaining a list of the 40 or 50 specialists that they routinely refer to. They then know their cell phone numbers, how to get hold of them, and other information they wish to share.
Why is this ground-breaking?
According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, the average primary care physician in the United States will refer patients to 270 specialists a year. To put that another way, physicians have to find a different specialist every day, all year long. That is a daunting challenge for anyone.
Jeff is a super-nice guy and took time out from his busy schedule and a newborn daughter to speak with me. Check out Part 1 over at Bridge 6.
Here’s my interview with Ilyssa Levins and Wayne Pines of The Center for Communications Compliance. Here’s Mr. Pines:
The Internet moves at the speed of light and the FDA is clearly not able to keep up with that pace from a policy standpoint…
Every company has its own internet site or sites and every company has product-specific sites. The FDA’s approach to those sites has been to regulate them as if they were print media. That is, they have to have fair balance with regard to the product’s risks, and full disclosure in the form of the package insert.
Check out Part 1 here.
Within3 has a unique model when it comes to social media for physicians. The site:
focuses exclusively on helping health and life science organizations create powerful, online venues that improve the way they collaborate and communicate with health professionals
Over at Bridge 6, I interviewed Lance Hill, the C.E.O. Read Part 1, here.
Cliff Mintz is the founder of BioCrowd, one of the largest, and most dynamic social networks for biotech researchers. (He’s also a kick-ass writer and a major contributor over at Life Science Leader – here’s his interview with Craig Venter). As part of my series on professional-facing social media sites, I interviewed Cliff over at Bridge 6.
As I’ve said before, these I am focusing my blogging efforts at Bridge-6.com, here’s my latest post on How Doctors are Using Social Media.
If you’re not familiar with GirlTalk, here’s a brilliant introduction to the musician from this week’s NYTimes Sunday Magazine:
Imagine old, bald Pete Townshend shuffling gingerly onstage as a synth burbles up behind him — “Let My Love Open the Door.” Now imagine the rapper Pimp C already on that stage, in a white fur suit and hat, holding up four fingers to show off his bling. A kick line of girls in black minishorts walks it out for DJ Unk, who’s rapping about a kick line of girls, then Levon Helm appears on a drum riser to chirp out “The Weight.” Also onstage: Jay-Z, Black Sabbath, Rick Springfield, Kesha, Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, the Ramones and Tupac and Biggie Smalls (both back from the dead) and hundreds more. In the audience are a few thousand fans jammed together beneath a blinding light show, waving their arms as rolls of toilet paper and explosions of confetti fall around them.
Ex-bioengineer Gregg Gillis has been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years, not only because his last album, “All Day,” released last November, crashed servers, but because of the sheer number of samples used to create a single song (here’s a site where you can stream each song and see what samples compose each song).
But what does GirlTalk and rampant sampling have to do with genomics?
There’s a section in the NYTimes article that got me thinking about the future of genomics, especially in light of last year’s ACLU v. Myriad decision:
You might expect that Girl Talk’s success has made Gillis a legal target. His sound collages are radically different from their sources, far more than the sum of their parts, but to an entertainment lawyer they might look like a lawsuit. Or, in the words of Lawrence Lessig, author of “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,” “a gold mine.”
To secure permission to use the 373 samples on “All Day” would cost, Gillis estimates, millions of dollars. Some labels would refuse, others would draw him into endless negotiation. But he has never been sued. No one has ever asked him to stop doing what he’s doing. One of the acts he samples on “All Day,” the Toadies, proudly put a link to Girl Talk on their home page.
“We don’t realize how much the notion of creation has changed for people under the age of 25,” Lessig says. He suggests that in 20 years the sampling issue will seem “completely bizarre (emphasis mine).”
And perhaps we will come to see the same thing as we start sampling organisms for specific genes and creating synthetic bio-machines. Kids will say, “What? You were able to patent genes?”
What do you think?
