Press Release of the Week: Drug Delivery!

Most of the releases we receive are from dedicated health care PR pros. If the topics aren't right up our alley, then they tend to be at least tangentially related to what we cover. But yesterday we got a doozy. Put it this way: we never thought we'd be considering the question "Which Air Cannon is right for me?" At least not during our day jobs.

Although this latest bit of press-release inspired amusement is right out of left field, but it did inspire us in a we-thought-everyone-was-done-making-fun-of-Exubera-but-maybe-not sort of way. What you see up there on the right is an "Air Cannon." It's hard to imagine the PR guy who is pitching a biopharma-medical device magazine on a story about these babies really thinks it'd be of much use to, say, Pfizer or Medtronic (or for that matter thinks much at all), but we gave it a shot:

• next-generation Exubera inhaler
• tired of waiting for your prescription to be filled at the pharmacy? Just give the pharmacist your coordinates and wait for your statins to land on your front lawn
• spice up panel discussions by shooting "My vice president of business development went to Pharmaceutical Strategic Alliances and all i got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts into an unsuspecting audience

So any of you PR folks out there who can occasionally find us unresponsive ... take note. When Air Cannons, Inc. Provides Creative Ways to Whip Crowds into a Frenzy shows up in the old in-box, we're all over it.

Musical Chairs at Novartis, Except When the Music Stops, 1250 Fewer Chairs

Novartis posted its third quarter results this morning and missed its profit guidance. Genericization, delays to Galvus, and the withdrawal of Zelnorm all contributed to a 12% decline in earnings. And so out comes the axe. Oddly enough, the press release was titled "Novartis delivers record earnings in first nine months of 2007 thanks to strong operational performance and divestment gains." Is it time to revive IN VIVO Blog's 'press release of the week' feature?

Novartis is cutting 1250 jobs (mostly in sales, and including 510 'third-party' sales positions) in the US, a move cheered by analysts and expected to result in savings of about $230 million in 2008. The layoffs are part of a restructuring of its pharma development and commercialization organization.

Most conspicuously Thomas Ebeling, the current head of pharma, will be shuffled over to Novartis' consumer business--a position perhaps more suited to his background: he came to Novartis from Pepsi a decade ago. At pharma he'll be replaced by American Joe Jimenez, the current head of the consumer business who joined Novartis earlier this year (and was until 2006 European president and CEO of the food giant Heinz), effective immediately, "to expand management experience and provide fresh impetus." That might be a new euphemism, we're not sure.

Less surprisingly, the company is also establishing Novartis Biologics "as a focused unit to accelerate and optimize the potential of research and development of innovative biologic medicines." We've noted before (and discuss at length here) certain pharma's need to bulk up in large molecules. Novartis says:

This unit will unify and expand the expertise within Novartis by bringing together the key elements necessary for fast and high-quality R&D activities and to help attract top talent. Biologics comprise 25% of the pre-clinical research pipeline at Novartis and are increasingly a priority in R&D activities.

It will be interesting to see whether Novartis feels the need to augment its internal biologics capabilities with the kind of external moves being pondered by Sanofi-Aventis and Pfizer. The company has inked some 22 deals in large molecules over the past five years and most impressively has bulked up in vaccines (through the full acquisition of Chiron) and in RNAi, though a first-mover deal with Alnylam.

But back to the layoffs for a moment. Novartis' cutbacks don't approach the level of some of the other Big Pharma that have cut back this year--see the chart below from the September issue of IN VIVO--and will mainly be executed by not filling vacant positions, the company says.

Nevertheless, can the decision be seen in the broader context of the general shrinkage of Big Pharma sales forces, thanks to a variety of factors including but not limited to the rise of biologics and a shift toward specialist medicines? Which brings us back to the pharma/consumer reshuffle; both execs' backgrounds are more grounded in consumer marketing than pharmaceuticals. To say the least appointing Jimenez to the pharma post goes against the grain of the specialist marketing trend.

Confused Communications

I suppose it’s tempting to try to spice up the news during slow summer months. But Northwest Biotherapeutics should have known better than to issue a press release earlier this month declaring its delight in being “the first company to reach the market with a personalized therapeutic vaccine for brain cancer.”

The release stated that Switzerland’s Institute of Public Health had issued an Authorization for Use for the product. Exciting news, it seemed. The wires and papers picked it up. Even VCs and analysts were fooled--London-based house brokers Collins Stewart issued a report that talked about “history in the making”, with this first approval for “a new class of product called personalized vaccines.” This, the analyst said, was a “high value event.”

So in flocked the investors—Northwest’s stock, listed on the OTC bulletin board in the US and on London’s AIM since June this year, more than tripled.

Trouble is, it wasn’t an approval at all. The ‘news’ was an import-export authorization for the product in Switzerland, and one with conditions attached, which the company is still fulfilling. Northwest won’t seek product approvals in the US and EU before 2009.

All of this was clarified in a release issued a week later (why not clarify it properly in the first one?) prompting the stock to fall back to where it started.

Now, we’re not saying Northwest set out to deceive or confuse—you can judge that one for yourself. But we are saying that positioning an import-export order as equivalent to “reaching the market”—which is what Northwest did—is just silly. And suggesting, as the second release did, that the media is to blame isn’t very clever either.

Yes, cancer vaccines are indeed an exciting, promising area where a handful of companies may be on the cusp of a breakthrough. (Dendreon’s Phase III Provenge, an active cellular immunotherapy treatment for prostate cancer, received an approvable letter from FDA in May 2007.)

But the sector already has to battle with the disappointment caused by over-optimistic mainstream press reports about cures for cancer and Parkinson’s disease being around the corner. It doesn’t need its own members fuelling that fire. Nor does it need another report of misleading behavior, whether in promotional activities or in corporate communications.

Northwest has come back from the edge once already—it was saved by VC fund Toucan Capital after bombing out following its December 2001 Nasdaq listing. This episode won’t reassure its new investors. It wouldn't be surprising at all if the SEC took a long look at the announcements, given the share price movements. Nor will it help anyone else in the space, either—least of all the brain cancer patients with only a handful of inadequate treatments currently available to them.

Press Release of the Week

To paraphrase The Late Show With David Letterman (and Perry Como), we get press releases! Stacks and stacks of press releases!

And don't get us wrong, The IN VIVO Blog is all for a good pun--sometimes, even a bad one. But this release from Datamonitor is a bit much. Roll your eyes with us, below.





If we hadn't regularly received press releases from this guy before, we'd guess even his name was in on the act. In any case, let this be the first in an ongoing series highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly (and the pun-riffic) of biopharma industry press releases. As if you hadn't seen enough.