Eli Lilly and Co. hopes to extend the life of its best-seller Zyprexa with a potentially lucrative, long-acting form of the antipsychotic drug. But first, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker must win over a panel of medical experts convened by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Feb. 6.
A new leader will guide the city’s largest company in 2008, with some of the biggest challenges in its history on the horizon.
Eli Lilly and Co. announced Dec. 18 that CEO Sidney Taurel will step down March 31 and will be replaced by President John
C. Lechleiter, who has been the heir apparent for more than two years.
When Eli Lilly and Co. CEO Sidney Taurel announced his retirement Dec. 18, he said he was leaving the company in good shape.
And he can cite plenty of evidence to support him. But when Taurel steps down as CEO March 31, he also will leave a legacy
of a languishing stock price and some costly mistakes that some think could have been avoided. “The facts are the facts; I
guess you can’t ignore it. The stock price has been…
John C. Lechleiter, whom Eli Lilly and Co.’s board voted to replace Sidney Taurel as CEO, is known for getting things done
and yet also for being good at analysis and relating to people under him. Taurel will step down at the end of March but remain
chairman until the end of 2008.
Eli Lilly and Co. will shrink itself with “great intensity” over the next few years, in part by
outsourcing. For other local life sciences firms, that’s a fat pitch for new business. But it’s not clear if non-Lilly firms
can grow fast enough to offset the jobs and wages Indianapolis will lose from Lilly.
There’s a $2 billion hole in Eli Lilly and Co.’s future. That’s roughly how much pretax profit Lilly derives each year from
its best-seller, Zyprexa, according to calculations by IBJ. And it’s how much black ink will start running off Lilly’s books
once Zyprexa’s U.S. and European patents expire in 2011.
Eli Lilly and Co. stock has returned just 1 percent per year in the nine years since CEO Sidney Taurel took office. Meanwhile,
Taurel has taken home $44 million in pay and been given stock options valued at $114 million more. But most Lilly shareholders
aren’t raising a call for Taurel to hit the trail.
Pfizer Inc.’s new inhaled insulin product, Exubera, has stumbled out of the gate. That would appear to keep the door open
for Eli Lilly and Co., as well as for other companies racing to develop inhaled insulin. But Pfizer’s troubles might cause
doctors and patients to sour on all inhaled insulin products.
Eli Lilly and Co.’s loss in May of a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by Ariad Pharmaceuticals
Inc. went down as the 6th-largest such jury award last year, a Bloomberg analysis shows.
Eli Lilly and Co. is facing another round of litigation over its star seller, Zyprexa, as insurers and third-party payers
ask to be reimbursed for covering the antipsychotic drug.
Eli Lilly and Co. has picked an insurer it knows extremely well to cover future problems in the high-stakes world of product liability litigation–itself. The Indianapolis drugmaker opted for self-insurance after struggling to find coverage in what it terms a “very restrictive insurance market.”
The July 21 announcement by Lilly Endowment Inc. that it will reduce its holdings in Eli Lilly and Co. by $2 billion will have enormous repercussions. It’s meant to decrease volatility in the endowment’s assets, but it also erodes one of Lilly’s key antitakeover provisions.
