Hello, everyone, and how are you today? We are doing just fine, thank you, especially since the middle of the week is upon us. After all, we have made it this far, so we are determined to hang on for another couple of days. And why not? The alternatives — at least those we can identify — are not particularly appealing. And what better way to make the time fly than to keep busy. So grab that cup of stimulation and get started. Our flavor today is, once again, Jack Daniels, for those tracking our habits. Now, though, the time has come to get busy. So please grab your own cup and dig in to the items of interest assembled below. We hope you have a wonderful day, and please do keep in touch. …
Pfizer tapped its chief oncology officer, Chris Boshoff, to head all of its research and development efforts in addition to keeping his current duties overseeing the company’s scientific and commercial efforts in cancer, STAT writes. Boshoff, 61, replaces Mikael Dolsten, who led research and development at the drug giant for 15 years and who announced his plans to retire in July. The news may disappoint some investors, who may have hoped for a new voice on the Pfizer executive team who could change the approach to picking experimental drugs and choosing how to put resources behind them. Instead, Boshoff is a familiar part of the executive leadership who has been at Pfizer for 11 years and who is already the face of a huge bet in cancer. His ascent comes as Pfizer struggles to escape its post-pandemic slump and faces calls from activist investor Starboard Value to turn around performance. The hedge fund recently took a roughly $1 billion stake in Pfizer.
Johnson & Johnson and Merck are cutting jobs in China, as they face growing competition from domestic rivals resulting from Beijing’s campaign to drive down medical costs, Bloomberg News writes. The J&J cuts mainly impacted a division that sells products used in surgery, while Merck scaled back in its diabetes unit. Chinese media outlets cited the J&J layoffs to be as much as a fifth of its mainland workforce. J&J employs nearly 10,000 people across some 90 cities in China, according to its website. Multinational drug and medical device makers are grappling with narrower profit margins in China, largely due to the country’s system of having companies bid to supply drugs and devices to public hospitals — known as volume-based procurement. The program has seen global pharmaceutical companies lose hospital contracts to cheaper local suppliers, essentially putting their sales teams out of work in those categories.
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