Company news

WellPoint Inc. director Lenox Baker said there is no move on the company’s board to oust CEO Angela Braly even after an institutional investor said last week she needs to go. “Angela, I think, has done a great job,” Baker, a retired cardiac surgeon, told Bloomberg News. “Quite frankly, I think some of this stuff with the company is coming from Wall Street. I’m much more looking to the future.” WellPoint, the second-biggest U.S. health insurer, reported earnings last month that missed analyst estimates, said it would lose 900,000 members, and reduced its 2012 forecast. Those announcements prompted Leon Cooperman, whose hedge fund Omega Advisors owns 2.1 million WellPoint shares, to tell Bloomberg: “There’s a universal view that the CEO is the wrong CEO to lead the business.” Since Braly became chairwoman of WellPoint in 2010, the company’s stock price has fallen 8.5 percent. During the same time, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group has seen its stock rise 53 percent. The results “put an exclamation point on the differences between United and WellPoint,” Carl McDonald, a Citigroup analyst in New York, wrote in a note to clients. “Time may be running out for WellPoint’s management team.”

Eli Lilly and Co. will receive more than $1.2 billion in early payments from its former drug development partner Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. The payments come after Lilly competitor Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. finished its $5 billion acquisition of Amylin. Indianapolis-based Lilly partnered with California-based Amylin to launch the diabetes drugs Byetta and Bydureon. But a dispute arose between the two companies after Lilly launched another diabetes drug, Tradjenta, in partnership with Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH. Lilly intends to use the Amylin payments to pay development costs of new drugs it hopes to bring to market.

Dr. Craig Brater will retire in June next year as dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine, he announced Wednesday, and the school has formed a committee to find his replacement. Brater, 66, has worked at the Indianapolis-based school for 26 years, including the past 12 as dean. The school is the second-largest medical school in the nation and the only one in Indiana. Brater oversees a massive operation that includes a main campus in Indianapolis and eight satellite campuses throughout the state. The medical school had a budget of nearly $426 million in the last school year, up 30 percent over the past five years. It employs 1,900 professors who oversee a total student body of 1,880 and also serves doctors at five hospitals in Indianapolis, including Wishard Memorial Hospital, the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and IU Health’s University Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children. Brater is a native of Oak Ridge, Tenn. He attended undergraduate and medical school at Duke University. Before IU, he was part of the faculty at the University of California at San Francisco and worked for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.