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Restructuring for Success: Shifting Biotech Strategies

During a panel discussion at Elsevier Business Intelligence’s Therapeutic Area Partnerships conference in Boston in December 2011, experienced investors and biotech executives drew lessons from difficult restructurings and successful transitions.

At a January 2012 Goldman Sachs CEO conference, Merck & Co. Inc. CEO Ken Frazier, noting his company’s poor investor return in 2011 relative to its peers, acknowledged the company’s shortcomings for the year. But then he implored his investor audience that while they were free and right to judge Merck on its successes and failures, they should also judge the company on how it responded – clinically, strategically, structurally – in the face of ill fortune. “The company showed a significant amount of adaptability and resilience in the face of that … and it was a positive year in terms of what got done,” said Frazier.

His is an argument that isn’t just the defensive posturing of a large company executive. In biotech, where failure and...

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