This is from yesterday’s WSJ – many thanks to the readers who passed it on. The link will only be active for about a week more, so read it now!
The Rev. Franco Decaminada isn’t a typical pharmaceutical-industry executive: He works in a palazzo owned by the Vatican, speaks in Gospel metaphors and has taken a religious vow of poverty.
But two years ago, Father Decaminada, a priest and chief financial officer of the Roman Catholic religious order Congregation of the Children of the Immaculate Conception, engineered the acquisition from Pfizer Inc. of a leading Italian biotechnology lab outside Milan specializing in cancer-drug research. The Congregation has rechristened the lab Nerviano Medical Science, or NMS, and has signed drug-development deals totaling more than $400 million with Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
Earlier this month, NMS took an important step toward developing a commercially viable drug when it began Phase II trials on around 300 people for its top drug candidate — an Aurora inhibitor, a molecule that targets the reproductive mechanisms of cancer cells. The Aurora inhibitor recently became the first of its kind to complete Phase I clinical testing.
Behind the religious order’s acquisition is an unorthodox plan: If it becomes a successful, albeit niche, player in the pharmaceutical industry, the order hopes to have bigger clout in pushing for more ethical business practices from the inside out. "The acquisition is saying what a homily in a church cannot," explains Father Decaminada.
The Congregation’s immediate goal is to turn big profits on NMS’s platform of cancer-fighting drugs. It would then pour the proceeds into finding cures for some of the diseases prevalent in the developing world, such as tuberculosis and malaria, which attract scant interest from big drug companies. In addition, if big drug companies are interested in its cancer products, the Congregation hopes it can persuade them to adopt more ethical practices in how those drugs are tested, marketed and priced.
"Without a doubt we are serious about entering the market and playing by its rules. At the same time we have the will and the obligation to discuss ethics with even the industry’s biggest players," Father Decaminada says.
For more than a century, the Congregation has maintained a network of health clinics for the poor, and operates in countries such as Albania, Brazil and Nigeria. During this time, it was uncomfortable being a client of an industry it thought broke ethical bounds, catering to rich nations by marketing drugs at high prices while neglecting to develop newer vaccines for preventable diseases in the developing world. It was also worried that clinical trials of experimental drugs were becoming less safe and less accurate as drug firms do more human testing in developing nations where regulation is lax.
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