Articles By Rob Wright

  1. It's Not The Tool, It's The Technique 4/29/2014

    My son plays on his college’s golf team. In the fall he was struggling with his putting. What is the obvious solution needed to fix the problem? Why, to buy a new putter of course. It could not possibly be anything to do with the technique. It must be the tool.

  2. Merck Serono's CEO Belén Garijo – Enabling Risk And Refusing To Play It Safe 4/1/2014

    Sitting on the secondlevel balcony of the grand ballroom in the historic New York Waldorf-Astoria, my vantage point provides a bird’s-eye view of the floor below. Today, the room serves as a central meeting place for attendees of the sixteenth BIO CEO and Investor Conference. I wonder aloud to my table guest, Belén Garijo, M.D., as to the uniqueness of being interviewed in this venue.

  3. How To Improve Clinical Trials – Some Good Old-Fashioned Wisdom 3/5/2014

    Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years. What came to be known as Moore’s Law has basically held true ever since.

  4. Reports Of U.S. Biomedical R&D Demise – A Great Exaggeration 2/2/2014

    Prior to heading out to the 32nd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last month, I stumbled across several article headlines indicating the United States’ domination of global biomedical R&D was fading. What metric was used to determine this? R&D spend. According to “new” research from the University of Michigan Health System, the U.S. share of the global biomedical R&D business declined from 51 percent to a mere 45 percent from 2007 to 2012. And while Europe remained unchanged at 29 percent, Asia rose from 18 to 24 percent.

  5. Mission TransCelerate: Transforming The Drug Development Terrain 1/8/2014

    During the ill-fated 1970 Apollo 13 mission to the moon, it was astronaut Jack Swigert who alerted ground control that something had gone terribly wrong when he uttered the phrase, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Those same words seem very fitting to the current state of affairs around the skyrocketing costs of drug discovery. Recent estimates place the expense of successfully bringing just one drug to market at between $350 million and $1.2 billion. However, in the last decade, companies having brought 4 to 13 drugs to market have watched the price tag reach stratospheric heights — orbiting $5 billion+. “I think the pain point has reached a threshold that’s no longer bearable,” states Dalvir Gill, Ph.D., CEO of TransCelerate BioPharma.

  6. Shire's $120 Million Single-Use Gamble 12/12/2013

    Project Atlas is a 200,000 square foot biologics manufacturing facility. This facility is unique because its entire upstream line utilizes single-use systems, but what’s more interesting is the plant $210 million dollar price tag is $127.6 million shy of the company’s annual profit.

  7. Eli Lilly Research Lab Tour Reveals More Than Meets The Eye 11/1/2013

    Lilly Research laboratories (LRL) opened doors to a select group of media for a rare behind-the-scenes tour of three new innovation labs.

  8. NeoStem's CEO Spearheads Stem Cell Research Collaboration With The Roman Catholic Church 10/31/2013

    Robin Smith, M.D., CEO of NeoStem, strikes up a conversation about stem cell research benefits with one of the largest, wealthiest organizations that are very publicly against embryonic stem cell research – the Roman Catholic Church.

  9. How To Take Charge Of Your Public-Private Partnerships 10/31/2013

    The process of creating a public-private partnership (P3) can be very challenging not only due to the size of the organizations involved (NIH), but the navigation of academic and government-institution policies and procedures for brokering a partnership can be a labyrinth.

  10. From Obscurity To Innovation Engine – The Evolution Of Specialty Pharma 10/31/2013

    By 2018, it is estimated specialty drug spend will surpass traditional drug spend, and in three years market research project 7 of the top 10 bestselling drugs will be specialty drugs. With such as staggering growth how will insurance companies be able to afford to pay for such lifesaving treatments.