of course, you'd need 34,000 of these piles, but you get the ideaIN VIVO Blog readers are the smartest blog readers in the world (it's true, we read it on Wikipedia) and therefore when more than 50% of you are currently suggesting in our poll that Pfizer's planned $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth is a bad deal for both companies, we assume you've got ideas of your own on how to spend $68 billion.
Ask Monty Brewster: spending that kind of dough is definitely not easy. So how would we do it? Your IN VIVO Blog team came up with a few suggestions, just as we did for Roche back in the summer of '08.
Any ideas of your own? Lets see them in the comments. For the record, buying 68 billion hot dogs on dollar-dog-night at your local ballpark is already taken. Pig.
- Bail out California. According to the Governator: "The $42 billion deficit is a rock upon our chest and we cannot breathe until we get it off." HELP CALIFORNIA BREATHE!
- Smaller, targeted acquisitions is a popular idea among your IV Blog staff. Want to bulk up in Alzheimer's? Buy Elan for half of bapinuzumab. Or, there are a handful of start-ups ripe for the taking. Vaccines? Why not buy Crucell, as Wyeth was planning to do. Oncology? Celgene. Platform? Alnylam! The list goes on and on.
- Sign Manny Ramirez to a four-year deal to play LF for company softball team. (That's just "Pfizer being Pfizer".)
- Continue the risk/profit sharing most notably defined by the Pfizer/BMS deal on apixiban with a large group of other companies--say, a dozen. That leaves about $50 billion to chip in elsewhere. You know, pocket change.
- Buy 38 billion 8 oz. boxes of Kraft macaroni & cheese (dino-shapes optional) as comfort food for the newly unemployed.
Another thing Pfizer could do a tiny fraction of the $68b is to fire some of its senior management cadre and hire some of the top brass at Wyeth, Genentech etc. Unlike Pfizer, the Wyeth guys had the foresight to venture into Vaccines and Biologics 7 years earlier. They also had the good sense to stay diversified (OTC meds etc). True that the top tier under McKinnell has already departed but Read, Mackay, Lichtinger, Brandicourt and other folks also served under McKinnell and all they did during those years was to say "Yessir"! Pfizer would also be wise to ditch more of its R&D folks and retain a greater share from Wyeth, if they would really like to transform their R&D productivity. These are some of the lessons from the WL and Pharmacia merger that Kindler should learn from.
ReplyDeleteWanna get young people across the world into the lab & engaged in our industry?
ReplyDeletePublicly fund a $1 Billion contest for the smartest minds in the industry to overhaul the Big Pharma business model & bring new drug candidates to Pfizer's Clinical Development team.
For now, put the rest in your mattress. A really, really big mattress.
68 billion soft tacos. Yo quiero Taco Bell.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when the US dollar crashes in a hyperinflation event later this year due to over-stimulation?
ReplyDeleteTo protect their cash they should buy 68b dollars worth of gold.