Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Fred Hassan Finds New Perch - Health Blog - WSJ

By James A. White

hassanWe’ve been wondering for more than a year whether pharma mainstay Fred Hassan would become a CEO again following the sale of Schering-Plough to Merck. Now we know.

The former Schering-Plough CEO was named chairman of eye-care company Bausch & Lomb, whose board he had joined in November. Another Schering-Pough veteran, Brent Saunders, who headed Schering-Plough’s consumer health-care unit, also is joining Bausch & Lomb as CEO. Read their bios here.

Hassan has left a trail of deals behind him. As CEO of Pharmacia, he engineered that company’s merger with Monsanto and later spun off Monsanto’s agricultural business before selling Pharmacia to Pfizer. With those companies and as head of industry group PhRMA (see here, here and here), Hassan never shied away from attention.

Bausch & Lomb has been majority owned by private-equity firm Warburg Pincus since 2007. Reuters notes that following Schering-Plough’s takeover by Merck last year, Hassan became a senior adviser to Warburg Pincus.

The company is still trying to fully recover from a contact-solution recall in 2006 after links to fusarium keratitis, a rare fungal eye infection, were found. The company continues to fight lawsuits over the matter. Current Bausch & Lomb Chairman and CEO Gerald Ostrov is retiring.

Photo: Associated Press

Posted via web from Jack's posterous

4 comments:

Pharma Giles said...

I'd rather go blind.

Message to Bausch & Lomb employees:

"You'll wish you'd gone to SpecSavers..."

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Anonymous said...

well! 5 yrs down the road, he will sell this company too. This is what he is good at doing.

Cure Acne said...

Are you seriously proposing, however, that we would be better off having no regulators, no police, no umpires, no effort to establish a level playing field?