India has the potential to become a “global innovation hub” for the biopharma industry, but without greater investment and regulatory reforms the opportunity may not be fully realized.

A report by The Boston Consulting Group released last week says the country must encourage greater investment and activity in bioinformatics, applied research, and translational research to maximize opportunities for R&D in the life sciences.

“India can become a global innovation hub, but there are several challenges to fully realizing its potential, particularly around policy, infrastructure, and creating collaborative partnerships,” said Kim Wagner, a BCG senior partner and coauthor of “Biopharma R&D: Moving the Needle in Innovation.”

The report was released at last week’s USA-India BioPharma & Healthcare Summit. Commissioned specifically for the day-long conference, the report — and the conference — put a special focus on oncology as a promising area for greater collaboration and investment by global pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms.

Three areas where India can play a major role in oncology R&D were identified in the report:

Building and Maintaining Unique Assets. India can help develop a vast cancer-specific genetic-information database through studies in genomics and proteomics. Once built, the database could be used to identify new biomarkers for personalized medicine, as well as better clinical-research models for more accurate R&D.

Creating Process Efficiency through Translational-Research Hubs. With faster patient-recruitment times, a large population of orphan diseases, and lower costs, biopharma can be faster in deriving proofs of concept and getting results in relevant drug R&D.

Driving Applied Research in Emerging Science. India can increase funding and infrastructure support for ongoing research in emerging nanotechnology-based applications in drug delivery and diagnostics.

The conference, held Friday in Cambridge, Mass., brought together leaders of several biopharma firms, academics, life science financial sector representatives, and Indian government officials. The annual event, sponsored by the USA-India Chamber of Commerce, included such topics as drug R&D, cross-border M&A, clinical research, funding innovation and trends.

“India offers vast opportunities for drug discovery and development for global pharma companies,” said Srikant Kumar Jena, Indian minister of state for chemicals and fertilizers. “The summit gains more prominence in view of developing global partnerships to deliver affordable innovations to the masses through strategic thinking and ground breaking solutions.”

The question of whether outside pharmaceutical sales reps should get overtime  made it to the U.S. Supreme Court last month. A ruling, which will affect the estimated 90,000 reps working in the U.S., is expected by the end of June. Two federal courts came to opposite conclusions on applying the Fair Standards Labor Act to the pharmaceutical industry. The FLSA exempts outside sales people from overtime requirements, so the issue before the Court is whether PSRs are covered. SHRM

Making its biggest acquisition in five years, AstraZeneca says it will buy Ardea Biosciences Inc. for $32 a share, a 54% premium over Ardea’s closing price Friday. Ardea is in the third phase of clinical testing lesinurad, its urea reducing drug for the treatment of gout. The San Diego-based Ardea also has cancer treatment drugs in mid-stage testing. For AstraZeneca, the acquisition, valued at $1.26 billion, may be the first of more this year. BusinessWeek

Amylin Pharmaceuticals, which rebuffed a takeover offer from Bristol-Myers Squibb, now has Carol Icahn to deal with. The billionaire investor filed suit against Amylin yesterday after the company refused to extend its deadline for nominating board members. And he says he’s ready with another suit if he doesn’t get copies of Amylin’s books and records by tomorrow. A 10% owner of Amylin, Icahn criticized the board of directors for turning down the $22 a share Bristol-Myers Squibb offered. Amylin, a former research organization, began commercializing its diabetes research in 2005 when it introduced two diabetes medicines. The Wall Street Journal

Pharmaceutical companies are missing an opportunity by focusing on generics, and branded generics when they do business in the world’s emerging markets. McKinsey & Company consultants say the second largest pharma market in the emerging world — Brazil –  is hungering for trustworthy, branded medicines and would pay a premium for them. To be sure, say the authors of a new report on opportunities in Brazil for Big Pharma, not everyone is a candidate for patented meds, but nearly half the country’s 120 million middle class citizens are. And that, says McKinsey, translates into “a large, profitable opportunity.” McKinsey Quarterly

Could be that the days of in-house R&D by the big pharmaceutical companies are waning, and outsourcing (in a sense) the development of new drugs is rising.

That’s more or less what Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher told journalists during the CED Life Sciences Conference last month. In a novel — for Big Pharma — deal, Sanofi partnered with a venture capital firm to launch a biotech firm. Warp Drive Bio will develop natural product drugs while Sanofi may handle the licensing and marketing.

The industry is closely watching what the European drug giant is doing and how the unusual collaboration will turn out. Viehbacher, however, told journalists that business models are changing and Big Pharma is not immune to the changes.

“What Sanofi is doing is reducing its own internal research capacity,” Viehbacher is quoted as saying. “The days when we locked all of our scientists up in a building and put them on a nice tree-lined campus are done. We will do less of our own research.”

R&D costs are a factor, he explained, but the primary driver behind investing in early stage firms is that is where the smartest people are.

“The reality is the best people who have great ideas in science don’t want to work for a big company. They want to create their own company. So, in other words, if you want to work with the best people, you’re going to have go outside your own company and work with those people.”

As might be expected, industry bloggers and others jumped all over Viehbacher. Derek Lowe, who writes the durg industry blog, In The Pipeline, sarcastically commented, “So, if you’re one of Sanofi’s dwindling number of internal scientists, at least now you know what you’re being treated the way you are. It’s because you’re, well, you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed.”

Whether Viehbacher intended to suggest his own scientists and researchers are not as good as those launching their own firms, or he was simply tone deaf to how his words would come across, his meaning was just what the tech industry discovered long ago. “Big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation,” he added. “There has to be some element of disruptive thinking to have innovation and I can tell you that big companies do everything to avoid any disruptive thinking in their companies.”

His vision of Big Pharma’s future business model is to partner with equity investors, providing some of the financing, but certainly the administrative and regulatory know-how to vet a drug, and, very probably, the marketing and licensing prowess.

“Every venture capitalist I’ve ever talked to is interested in this model because they clearly see opportunities.”

Big pharma is going through so profound a marketplace change that alone in the life sciences industry the sector views the future with uncertainty, hesitant to take the plunge on training and performance management to achieve the customer-centric approach its leaders claim they want.

Hay Group consultants say that even after making deep cuts in their sales force the last few years, half of all pharmaceutical companies believe they are still overstaffed. Many report plans to make further reductions ranging from 6% to 15%.

A report in Pharm Exec by Hay Group practice leaders and authors of the 2011 Annual Study of Sales Force Effectiveness talks about the “dramatic structural change” in the pharmaceutical marketplace and Big Pharma’s response.

“While smaller, more specialized companies appear to be aggressively hiring, Big Pharma is still fixated on continual cuts and retrenchment, as these organizations seek to find their way in an uncertain world,” says the introduction to the lengthy article.

Among the changes to the historical sales scenario identified in the article are the decrease in direct physician contact, the widening part played by generics, and the diminishing number of new blockbuster drugs coming to market. Though there is no universal agreement on how to change, there is an emerging sense that product differentiation and focusing on new customer groups may be the way to go. The Hay Group study found more companies last year intent on adopting a customer-centric sales approach.

Yet, in comparing what the Big Pharma companies were doing with regard to recruiting, training, and incentivizing their sales staffs, the study found a disconnect. “Integral organizational elements (for example, training and performance management programs or hiring priorities) may be lagging and possibly not providing appropriate support to these strategies,” the authors of the Pharm Exec article wrote.

“By far,” they note,”Companies prefer to hire from their competitors’ field sales forces, only infrequently tapping other departments within the company, or sales professionals outside the industry…  The finding that the dominant criteria used in hiring sales reps remains ‘years of pharma industry sales experience’ reinforces the concern that the commercial organization may not really be ready or willing to move in a new direction.”

Training for sales reps, the Hay study found, is still mostly focused on product knowledge, selling skills, and the like, with only 40% of the respondents to the survey reporting any effort at teamwork development. In-person training, and coaching/mentoring is the preferred method, though a shift toward the use of more e-learning and technology-driven techniques is discernible. It’s a trend the authors suggest may not be entirely positive.

However, in the area of compensation, they bemoan the slow adoption of qualitative components in determining the performance-based portion. Comp plans, they report, were primarily based on prescription volume (a primary factor according to 55% of the respondents), revenue (21%) and market share (21%).

Base salaries in 2011 averaged $84,700 for sales reps. With their 2010 bonuses included, the total payout averaged $114,300. District managers total payouts averaged between $185,800 and $188,900 for those considered “senior” or “advanced.”

However, such qualitative elements as teamwork, territory development, and especially customer satisfaction accounted for less than 10% of the overall performance measures. “Alarmingly, among the 13 qualitative measure options listed in the study, “customer focus/satisfaction” landed in 11th place,” the authors note. (For some types of jobs in the overall life sciences it did rate much higher; in first place for hospital regional  managers.)

“Certainly the commercial function lives and dies on its sales figures—and quantitative measures are expected to dominate,” agree the authors who advise, “But it may be wise for companies to invest more on the qualitative side, both in the incentive portion allotted to these measures and their choice of what to emphasize there.”

While the study, which benchmarks the industry annually, found companies are making changes, the article warns: “the pace of change is leisurely enough to suggest that companies opting for a truly radical shift in practice will end up changing the competitive game — in their favor.”

Just because you’re a reader of this blog, we have a special gift for you: An extra day next month to catch up on things.

OK, OK. Caught us. It’s leap year, so everyone will get that extra day. But hey, if you’d rather use it for fun, then stop doing stuff that only offers the illusion of working.

You know what we’re talking about. Things like checking your email every time that message icon pops up, or dropping what you’re doing to respond. Or actually reading every article on a Reply All list.

Author, business strategist, and consultant Dorie Clark has five suggestions for becoming more productive this year. These aren’t the usual time management yadda, yadda. None of those “finish one task before going on to another” kind of tips. Though, and here is a brief digression, it’s worthwhile to keep those routine efficiency tips in mind. And to actually practice what the experts preach. For instance:

• Make a daily list of key tasks and check each off when completed.
• Don’t just sort paperwork; handle it, then file it.
• Prioritize tasks. Important things first.

No less an authority on work and gens X & Y than Penelope Trunk says most multitasking reduces productivity. So, to be most productive, don’t multitask.

Now, back to Dorie Clark, whose time suck avoidance list reads like a list of secret sins. There’s the “Reading Annoying Things” ban, she proposes after confessing  to having “a dozen newspaper and magazine subscriptions, the result of alluring specials ($10 for an entire year!) and the compulsion not to miss out on crucial information.”

For your amusement, here’s a time wasting video addressing the very point Clark makes.

Her list (blogged on the Harvard Business Review, no less) provides ammunition to ignore “Mindless Traditions” and to eschew doing “Work That’s Not Worth It.”

Sure, it’s hard to break old habits, which is what makes taking Clark’s suggestion a good workplace resolution.

Are pharmaceutical sales representatives entitled to overtime? Like any question that involves laws and lawyers, the answer is “It depends.” In the west, at least that part covered by the 9th District of Appeals, the answer is no. In New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, where the 2nd District appeals court reigns, the answer is yes. The two courts applied the same Fair Labor Standards Act and came up with opposite results. The U.S. Supreme Court may have to step in to resolve the matter. Until then, read this then call your lawyer.

The co-chairs of next year’s Partnerships in Clinical Trials conference are calling for radical changes in the way trials and clinical research are conducted.

“The world has dramatically changed, yet this industry still more or less conducts clinical research exactly as it did 20 years ago,” said conference Co-Chair Deirdre BeVard, vice president of development operations at Endo Pharmaceuticals. “Sponsors and CROs together need to rethink our approach to clinical operations and partnering if we’re to keep up with all of the changes taking place around us.”

The program she and her co-chair, Pfizer SVP of Global Development Dr. John Hubbard, are finalizing emphasizes discussion on innovation and collaboration, in addition to education.

For 20 years, the Partnerships in Clinical Trials conference has been bringing together clinical research sponsors and clinical research organizations to foster relationships and encourage strategic partnerships, as well as to exchange learnings about methodologies and develop collaborative solutions to challenges.

The 21st annual conference, to be held in Orlando, FL March 4-7, will also seek to rally participants to consider how conventional clinical research practices might be overhauled.

“We have to change this industry and we have to change it fast,” said Hubbard.  “Business as usual is no longer an option,” he added. “We need to think beyond best practices to next practices.”

Should anyone doubt the commitment of the conference organizers, take note that the theme is “Provocative dialogue.  Insightful education. Purposeful collaboration.”

“Finding a CRO partner that will engage with the sponsor in the kind of rapid experimentation required to devise more efficient and innovative approaches to advancing clinical development is no easy task,” said BeVard. “We must break down traditional monitoring, data management and related roles, and make radical changes, not just incremental ones.”