E11 Lilly: Developing Cymbalta

E11 Lilly: Developing Cymbalta At 3:55 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon in April 2000, John Kaiser, marketing director at Eli Lilly and Company, spotted the clock in the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen and decided to make one last edit to the PowerPoint presentation he was to give at a 4 p.m. meeting. After editing and sending the slide deck to the color printer, Kaiser quickly reached for his cell phone. The meeting was scheduled to run for two hours, but given the topic-developing a successor to the now- legendary antidepressant Prozac-Kaiser wanted to call home and advise that he might be unavailable until 6:30 or 7:00 p.m. As a former global marketing director for Prozac, Kaiser knew firsthand of its success and that, though certainly possible, replacing it would not be easy. Following his call home, Kaiser quickly walked over to the color printer, picked up copies of the presentation which he had titled ”No Pain, No Gain” and headed off to the meeting. Prozac had only a few years left of patent protection before generic versions of the same molecule, fluoxetine, could be sold in the U.S. Historically, competition by generic manufacturers dramatically reduced the sales of the brand medication that they aimed to replace (Prozac, in this case). Though officially Prozac’s patent would expire in December of 2003, no one could be sure exactly how much time Prozac had left. Although a ruling of a U.S. District Court judge in 1999 upheld the patent for Prozac, Barr Laboratories, a manufacturer of generic drugs that hoped to sell its own version of generic fluoxetine, had already filed an appeal with a federal court in Washington, D.C., and a ruling was expected as soon as the summer of 2000. To management at Lilly, patent expirations were usually just part of the business of pharmaceuticals. However, Prozac was Lilly's flagship product and the market leader in the most popular class of medications used to treat depression-the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIS). Its annual sales of more than $2 billion would create an enormous revenue gap to fill. And although many at Lilly were actively engaged in planning for life after Prozac, pharmaceutical research and development was universally well-known for being an extremely long and risky process. According to one source, experimental drugs took an average of 12 years to travel from the lab to one’s medicine cabinet. On average, only one in 1,000 compounds to enter preclinical testing made it to human testing, and only one in five of those tested in humans was ultimately approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in the U.S.1 1 D. Wierenga and C. R. Eaton, ”Phases of Product Development,” Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp, http://www.allp.com/ drug_dev.htm, accessed December 3, 2005. Professor Elie Ofek and Dr. Ron Laufer prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2006-2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545- 7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to http:/ /www.hbsp.harVard.edu. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means-elect'ronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise-without the permission of Harvard Business School. Instructions: Identify all or most of the key issues presented by the case.  Discuss issues and reflect strong critical thinking and analytical skill.  Discuss analyze all or most of the recommendations called for by the case issues. All recommendations should be supported by data from all or most of the relevant case facts and exhibits data.  Data must be creatively manipulated and applied.  Discussions and recommendations must be presented clearly, logically, and succinctly with no or few grammatical or other errors.  Discussion/analysis must reflect strong understanding of principles presented in course readings/materials.  Where relevant, discussion/analysis must employ proper APA style. PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT :)