|
|
|
|
   
|
||||||
|
|
INSIGHT Teaneck, NJ, USA Sep. 7--Eisai Inc. might well serve as a poster child for a pharmaceutical recruiting drive in New Jersey. Eisai was established as the full-fledged American subsidiary of its parent Japanese drug maker, Eisai Co. Ltd., in Teaneck in 1995. The company sought the benefits -- a ready-made talent pool for hiring and a wealth of potential development and marketing partners -- from being near the many large pharmaceutical companies in the state. Since then, Eisai has seen its U.S. sales grow from nothing to more than $1 billion on the strength of two drugs -- Aricept for Alzheimer's disease and Aciphex for heartburn -- co-promoted with Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, respectively. Now, Eisai is bursting at the seams at its Teaneck headquarters at the Glenpointe Centre office complex. It has grown from 70 employees to 250 in the past three years and plans to add 50 more by March of next year. "We've not had trouble attracting people, and that's why we located here," said William Sheldon, Eisai's president and chief operating officer. After relying on bigger companies to market and sell its products, Eisai is beginning to strike out on its own more. Its deal in July with Pfizer to acquire exclusive U.S. promotional rights to Cerebyx, an anti-seizure medicine, illustrates this new direction. Sheldon, a Michigan native and industry veteran who worked for Ciba-Geigy for 27 years, sat down with The Record recently to discuss Eisai's niche, its future, and why he says pharmaceutical consolidation will help the company. QUESTION: What has Eisai's business model been in the United States, and what has the company achieved so far? ANSWER: Our business model so far has been partnering. If you're a very small company and you have products that are likely to be used by tens of thousands of doctors -- like we have with Aricept and Aciphex -- we decided to partner and did so successfully. That allowed us to grow our company very rapidly. We decided to do that because it would help us limit our infrastructure costs. We could hire people in the areas we thought were critical to our success, like research and development, marketing, and to hire sales reps that were specialty reps that would call on specialists, because that was consistent with our portfolio strategy. Going forward, we will continue to partner, but we are likely to partner in different ways. As well as these co-promotions, we'll partner by in-licensing [licensing certain rights to a product from another company], and we're looking now to build our business development skills. Q: Talk about the latest Cerebyx deal with Pfizer and how that came about. It seems to change Eisai's role from simply the company providing the drug. A: It's consistent with what our next five-year vision is, and that is to become more independently capable of developing, marketing, distributing either our products or products we in-license. Therefore, Cerebyx is the first step to that. It's not a co-promotion. It's an Eisai promotion, and we're taking that over on behalf of Pfizer. And that's consistent with trying to become more independently capable of doing things. Although I can't disclose exactly what they are, we have several more opportunities that we are trying to reach fruition with that will be similar. Q: What's the niche Eisai wants? A: We're trying to become a specialty pharmaceutical company and believe we can compete successfully with the bigger companies if we focus on a few therapeutic areas where we have knowledge. Those are neurology, with Aricept, and we have follow-on compounds in neurology. Another one is acute care. We have compounds in development for sepsis for stroke, and Cerebyx, although it is a neurology compound, is also used in an acute-care setting. The third area where we are working very hard is oncology. We have six compounds for solid tumors of all varieties. Q: What are the company's goals? A: The first is grow faster than the pharmaceutical market does generally in terms of sales. We need to be the growth arm of Eisai. There's health-care reform in Japan that is ongoing, and therefore we are the biggest growth arm. To develop our specialty niches as quickly as we can. To do business development in these therapeutic areas. To augment our portfolio, the first deal being Cerebyx. There will be more coming. And to do that with products that are not necessarily me-too followers. To do it with products that can be a real benefit to patients and their families. Q: Companies that look for a partner to market drugs often prefer companies with huge sales forces. What does Eisai, with 300 sales reps, offer? A: Rather than offering size, we offer specialization. There are products with companies looking for partners that need size. There are companies that look for specialization and a high level of knowledge in niche markets and we compete pretty favorably there, because we have the largest neurology-specific sales force in the country. We're looking for specialty products and can do as good a job with those specialty products as a bigger company can. Q: What are Eisai's plans for New Jersey? A: We plan to stay here. This is our home. This is the headquarters of Eisai. Last year, we grew the number of people here at Eisai by 50 percent. We're still growing. A lot of that growth is coming here. We plan to stay in New Jersey, we plan to stay in North New Jersey and keep on growing here. Our employees live here and they've helped us to grow our company and we want to make sure that we locate in a place where they can stay with us. Q: How have Japanese drug makers fared in penetrating the U.S. market? A: Variably. Some of them have done much better than others. Takeda, through their joint venture with Abbott and now in their own company, and Eisai have done quite well. Other companies are in a more embryonic stage. There are about 10 or 12 in Bergen County and they have the same goals, to have a business presence in the United States, but they are a little bit earlier in their development and therefore have a little longer to go. Q: How does consolidation of the overall drug industry affect Eisai? A: It helps us. When pharmaceutical companies consolidate, it raises the hurdle rate for the kinds of products they can successfully launch from a financial perspective. As their hurdle rate increases, our ceiling increases. Therefore it actually helps a specialty company like Eisai to have larger companies merge because it give us more opportunities they might not be able to tackle. Cerebyx, there's a good example. A company got to be so big it wanted a different company to handle one of their products. Q: Is Eisai looking to merge? A: We are looking for individual product opportunities to in-license or partner with, and we're looking at smaller companies. It wasn't long ago that there were no smaller companies than Eisai. We are now in a position where we are beginning to look at smaller companies that are development-stage companies or companies that are just beginning themselves to launch products as potential acquisitions.
Did you find this material interesting? Do you want more information of this type? Comment via FEEDBACK
Source: To see more of The Record, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.NorthJersey.com. (c) 2002, The Record, Hackensack, N.J. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
Please patronize our many sponsors, affiliates and advertisers today so that we may bring you more advanced services tomorrow. Have you seen the great deals from top brand name manufacturers?
|
|
|
