NEW YORK - Eli Lilly announced Tuesday that it has promoted John Lechleiter, who joined the company as an organic chemist in 1979, to president and chief operating officer. Lechleiter has also been made a member of the company’s board of directors. “The future is very much in our control,” says Lechleiter.
The promotion marks Lechleiter as a likely successor to Lilly Chairman and Chief Executive Sidney Taurel, who has headed the company since 1999. Before taking control of the company, Taurel spent three years as president and chief operating officer, and eight as a member of Lilly’s board. When asked whether he might be a contender for the top job at a company where he has worked since getting a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard, Lechleiter responded that the company would have no comment--and that his next job would almost certainly depend on how he performed in his new role. Lechleiter says he will run much of the drug giant’s day-to-day operations, allowing Taurel to focus more on big-picture strategy.
That will mean Lechleiter will help guide Lilly’s flagship pharmaceutical brands. He notes that the company has launched nine new drugs since 2001. Moreover, he argues, a big risk eased when Lilly won a court case that will prevent a generic version of its top-seller Zyprexa from reaching the market. The schizophrenia drug has annual sales of more than $4 billion. Lechleiter also notes that the company has settled the majority of product liability suits from patients who say they were not adequately warned that Zyprexa might cause diabetes.
Those cases were being argued by Chris Seeger of Seeger Weiss LLP, the same lawyer who is currently arguing the second case related to Vioxx, the withdrawn Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ) painkiller, in Atlantic City, N.J. But even as risks related to Zyprexa’s patent life and litigation have abated, there is another concern: competition. Prescriptions for Zyprexa in the U.S. have dropped more than 20% even as the overall market for antipsychotics has grown.
The big question for Lilly: Can it stabilize the loss, or even turn the trend around? That has focused attention on a big study released yesterday of most of the major schizophrenia drugs, including entrants from Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ), Johnson & Johnson (nyse: JNJ - news - people ) and AstraZeneca (nyse: AZN - news - people ). (See: "A Victory For Lilly--With Reservations.") But analysts are split on what the study, called CATIE, means for Zyprexa. It showed that the Lilly drug was most effective, but it also caused the most weight gain, as well as increases in blood sugar and cholesterol.
Lechleiter, however, sees no ambiguity in the results. “We couldn’t have written the script better,” he says. “We think it’s a huge win.” The battle over the antipsychotics market will be won in doctor’s offices, he argues, and he says that being able to say Zyprexa is most effective could translate into an advantage--even if the efficacy comes at a cost of some side effects.
Source: Forbes
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