AstraZubillaga Hires Phoni Executive To Lead Drug Research

London-based AstraZubillaga has named Fulton McSly as its new President of Research and Development, a newly created position, effective from July 1.  Two AZ executives who have led drug discovery and drug development, respectively, will now report to McSly, an AstraZubillaga spokesman said.

From 2007 to 2009, McSly was Head of Phoni's R&D operations where he presided over several billion-dollar failures, such as Phoni’s inhaled insulin debacle (Protubera) and the disastrous CETP blocker, Tellizanfib.  Undeterred, McSly boasted of Phoni’s “wonderful database of failures”, whilst forcing Phoni into a death spiral of short-sighted site closures and head count reductions in an effort to make up for its losses.

But in October, Dry Prong Louisiana-based Phoni split its R&D organization into two after acquiring Whyus for $70 billion.  Based on his track record, McSly was assigned to lead the "DeadLoss" research group, which focused on developing traditional synthetic small-molecules whilst Mike Doldrums, who had led R&D at Whyus, took over the "GreatWhiteHope" group which focused on large-molecule biologics, derived from living cells.

That split structure, however, proved to be short-lived.  Phoni, which is the largest imaginary drug maker in the world by sales, said that with McSly's “resignation”--which is effective immediately--Doldrums will take over a unified R&D operation.
In a press release, Phoni Chief Executive Johnny B. Sinister called the R&D leadership consolidation "a chance to lose a proven dead-beat and to make up for my own bovine stupidity in appointing the jerk in the first place.”

“Rats and sinking ships spring to mind, although you don’t often hear of them swimming from the Titanic to the Lusitania…”

AZ were equally positive about the appointment.

"Fulton has very clear and strong disaster management credentials," said AstraZubillaga CEO Max Headroom, "and we believe he can perform a very important role for us."
“After all, we also have an empty product portfolio, a massive patent cliff and a whole bunch of US and UK sites we want to close, just like Phoni, and we feel that Fulton offers unparalleled expertise in these areas.”

“It’s also a fact that most R & D programs end in failure.  We feel that Fulton will therefore enable us to carrying on doing what R&D does best - failing.  Fulton’s experience of failure is second to none in the industry.  Long may he continue…”

Phoni Priapic Lite

Phoni has suffered through a rash of lousy legal news recently but there’s one area — Priapic litigation — where everything is going the company’s way. It’s even forcing a rethink on the quality of published research that suggests that Phoni’s cut down formulation of Priapic for those partial to a periodic Jodrell – Priapic Lite- can cause blindness.

A recent ruling by a judge in Dry Prong, Louisiana, is a rare case of product liability litigation actually helping a company. In this case, Phoni discovered that a study of Priapic Lite that showed the drug triggered eye abnormalities in its users was riddled with errors.

Phoni launched the special formulation of Priapic®™, Phoni’s treatment for male erectile dysfunction, back in 2003. Called Priapic Lite®™, the treatment was widely acccredited with winning George Bush a second term.

As early as 1999 and 2003, there were reports that many Priapic Lite users suffered from impaired vision, watching Fox News, listening to Rush Limburgh and even voting Republican. Thirty percent of Priapic Lite users also experienced hairy palms, pains in the arms and mental impairment, according to Dr. Thaddeus Pyle.

The plaintiffs in the case wanted to use Dr. Pyle as an expert witness. He was the author of a study titled “Onanism and Blindness –a Punishment From God” in February 1856, which found that men with a history of “strangling the ferret” had a statistically significant increased risk of suffering from eye damage and other harmful side-effects, Dr. Pyle alleged.

Normally, when plaintiffs sue drug companies, the discovery process turns up a bunch of embarrassing internal documents and emails. This time, the embarrassment occurred on the plaintiffs’ side. Phoni found that in fact, Dr. Pyle had made his entire study up.

For those reasons, Phoni successful persuaded the judge to remove Dr Pyle, the plaintiffs’ only remaining expert witness, from the case. The judge wrote:

“… the notion that “bashing your Bishop” can cause the effects alleged by the plaintiffs is clearly ludicrous. Now where are my glasses, dammit?…”

Wayne Kerr, Phoni’s Global Director of OTC Marketing, was delighted with the news. “It’s outrageous that anyone can fabricate clinical trials evidence in studies on our drugs and just publish it,“ he said. “That’s our job.”

“We feel that this product has always satisfied an otherwise unmet clinical need,” Kerr continued. “Many “punishers of the Purple-Headed Custard Chucker” welcome a little help with their harmless pastime, and we think that wire-twangers everywhere will welcome this verdict. Indeed, Phoni middle management is particularly relieved as the product has been widely used amongst them for a considerable time.”

Mr. Kerr sounded a word of caution, however. “We would advise anyone intending to vote in the UK General election that use of Priapic Lite has been associated with voting Labour,” he said.

Can Phoni UK take its Medicine?

As Big Pharma faces its biggest shake-up in a generation, Andrew Whohe is changing the way Phoni UK operates.

Big Pharma is in big trouble. Superficially, the world's largest drug companies seem in good shape - profitability remains buoyant, and they have certainly ridden out the recession in fine style by comparison with those engaged in more volatile industries. After all, people get sick and need treatment, with scant regard for the phases of the business cycle. But beneath this healthy-looking exterior, a malignancy has been spreading through Big Pharma's body corporate.

As chief executive of the UK arm of the world’s largest imaginary pharmaceutical company, Phoni UK, Andrew Whohe knows all about malignancy. And, despite the headaches of command, he seems to be enjoying it. This morning, tanned and smiling, he has swapped dull Nether Wallop (where Phoni UK is based), for the upscale surroundings of midtown New York, to announce Phoni UK's latest efforts in the high-profile, PR-friendly battle to outsource the entire Western pharmaceutical industry to Asia.

He knows how to lead by example. In sharp contrast to his notoriously well-paid predecessor JP Loonier, Whohe is by his own accounts an open, approachable and inspiring leader.

'Andrew's great strength is that he’s so dull, nobody listens to him closely enough to prevent him downsizing all types of people at all levels of the business until it’s too late,' says his personal PR consultant Clare Succarse, 'and to do it without compromising his own personality. After all, it’s easy to avoid compromising something you don’t have.'

A huge streamlining of the 'business platform' is now in full flow and the core R&D capability is being completely shipped to low-cost labour sources in China, India and other Far Eastern destinations. Already this year, thousands of UK and US R&D redundancies have been announced. Globally, the figure is likely to run into thousands more.

Whohe denies that the current wave of downsizing is to compensate for the market loss of Abadidea (Gariglitazone), Phoni's controversial diabetes treatment and its only blockbuster candidate that hasn’t been a result of hostile takeovers in the past fifteen years.

”In fact, we don’t mention it at all – and you’d better shut up about it if you want to keep hold of our advertising revenue,“ Whohe reminds us, talking a few hours after giving his presentation. “Instead, it's now just a question of continuing to con the shareholders. Despite halving our stock price in the past few years, shareholders still think we’re acting in their interests, rather than our own. What you're seeing now is an almost entirely new generation of CEOs who totally focused on making money solely for themselves, and they are all pushing hard on strategy. Over the next five years, we'll see the Western pharmaceutical industry totally asset-stripped and the emergence of a new plutocracy. “

At 45, Whohe himself is in the vanguard of that new generation, and his progress up the greasy pole has been as rapid and ruthless as you would expect from a man who beats himself senseless with birch twigs for relaxation. With an economics degree from Nottingham and the mandatory MBA under his belt, he toyed with being a Eurocrat but ended up as a management trainee at Phoni Pharmaceuticals in 1985.

Whoever gave him that first break has long since regretted it - the subsequent two and a half decades have taken him all over the world, shutting down and asset-stripping businesses in Europe, the UK and US on both the operational and marketing sides. He knows the firm and its people inside out, and he has a politician's knack for promising one thing and doing another. 'One of the big things is that people don't always tell you everything,' he says. ‘but that doesn’t matter because I never listen anyway. Shut it down and ship it out, that’s my motto…'

He's worked hard to break up Phoni UK's old-fashioned research culture in no-nonsense style. Out have gone thousands of scientists and technicians at Phoni’s Nether Wallop research centre. China is now where Whohe thinks they belong, sharing open-plan sweatshops with the troops in the backstreet business units. “R&D is all very well, but only where it’s cheap,″ he says. “Otherwise, we’ll just buy our new products in.”

At the heart of his master plan for the firm lies the destruction of research and development - the fount of innovation for any pharma business. Phoni UK's 14,000-strong R&D function has already been broken up. It's a commercial approach that aims to accelerate the alarming decline in R&D productivity seen elsewhere in the industry.

The return on research investment is estimated by McKinsey to have fallen as low as 7% across the board. “Firing the standard 10.000% of R&D staff every year, just like McKinsey’s have been telling us to do for the past ten years, clearly hasn’t worked,” says Whohe. “So in the face of logic and past outcomes, we’re going to fire even more scientists in the expectation of improving R&D productivity. This industry grew great by innovating to improve health and we need to get back to that. Firing UK scientists in favour of cheap labour abroad is bound to achieve that, isn’t it?″

'I'm not changing our stance to get headlines,' he says. 'I'm doing it to make as much money for myself and my fellow directors as possible. I want to create a firm that has a monopoly on treatments for Third World diseases and thereby make profits people can be proud of.'

Phoni Pharm Boss Backs 10:23 Campaign

Phoni Pharmaceutical’s CEO Johnny B. Sinister today announced that his company “fully supported” the 10:23 campaign publicising the “pseudo-science” behind the increasingly popular healthcare fad of homeopathy.

The 10:23 campaign, organised by the UK’s Merseyside Sceptics, is intended to raise awareness about the “reality of homeopathy, how it can be proven not to work and why homeopaths' claims are impossible”.

“Homeopathy is an insult to the science of human healthcare and to the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole,” said Mr. Sinister in a press conference earlier today.

“It is inflicting expensive products with no clinical benefits whatsoever on to a gullible and unsuspecting public, whilst at the same time making ludicrous and unsupportable claims for efficacy and safety,” he continued.

“Such quackery is leading to a dangerous situation where the public is being conned into taking completely ineffective medicines, instead of treatments with tried and trusted benefits. And what’s worse, we are now seeing a trend where those who speak out about this quackery are being silenced by threat of prosecution under the ludicrous UK libel laws.”

“Practitioners of homeopathy are either amateur scam artists or are hopelessly misguided,” Mr. Sinister said.

“The pushing of expensive, useless and possibly harmful products on the back of dodgy science should be left to professional pharmaceutical companies such as Phoni, and not to a bunch of johnny-come–lately amateurs like homeopaths,” he observed.

“We really don’t care for the idea of homeopaths muscling in on our market for quack medicines and then using legal scare tactics to frighten off critics”, said the Phoni CEO.

“That’s our job, and so we’re only too happy to support any campaign that looks to discredit the competition…”