2017 WOMAN OF INFLUENCE: Jennifer Zinn
Jennifer Zinn, once an aspiring opera singer, instead became a key player at Roche Diagnostics.
Roche Diagnostics Corp.
Articles
Life Sciences Power Breakfast transcript
Indianapolis Business Journal gathered leaders in Indiana’s life sciences industry for a Power Breakfast panel discussion April 24. Among other topics, the panelists discussed whether Obamacare helps or hurts companies in the industry, the biggest barrier to life sciences startups, and how rising activity among angel investors has changed the life sciences landscape.
Falling reimbursements force Roche to innovate
U.S. sales are plunging for Roche Diagnostics Corp. and its fellow makers of diabetes-care devices because of lower reimbursements from the federal Medicare program. In five years, two of the four largest companies will have sold or closed their diabetes businesses, according to two industry analysts.
New institute aims to attract 100 research scientists to Indiana
The $360 million initiative will be formally launched on Thursday by Gov. Mike Pence, executives of five major life sciences companies and officials of the state’s research universities.
Company news
Roche Diagnostics Corp. is mulling a sale of its blood-glucose meter business, according to a Reuters report, a move that would cast uncertainty over the nearly 1,000 people working for its diabetes business in Indianapolis. Reuters reported the potential sale May 15, citing three people familiar with the matter. A Roche spokesman declined to comment to IBJ. The entire blood-glucose meter industry faces a huge hit to sales July 1, when the federal Medicare program will start a competitive bidding program for blood-glucose testing strips and supplies. Bidding could cut Roche's payments as much as 72 percent. The Medicare cuts will directly affect a Roche test-strip plant in Indianapolis, which employs more than 150 workers and churns out more than 2 billion strips per year. Roche Diagnostics’ North American blood-glucose monitor sales declined 6 percent last year, to $598 million, according to Close Concerns Inc., a market research firm based in San Francisco. Close Concerns predicts Roche's blood-glucose sales in North America will swoon this year by 23 percent, to $463 million. Reuters' sources said there are only a few possible buyers of Roche’s blood-glucose meter business, including Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc. and New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson.
While its diabetes business struggles, Roche Diagnostics’ laboratory testing business is riding high on the trend of personalized medicine. On May 14, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new Roche test to detect a gene mutation found in about 10 percent of non-small cell lung cancers. That’s important because Switzerland-based Roche’s pharmaceutical business has a drug, Tarceva, that the FDA said could be used in patients with the mutation whose cancer is spreading. The new test is the first approved to detect the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, gene, according to a Reuters report.
Construction has stopped on a generic insulin facility being built with a $6 million loan from the city of Greenwood. Greenwood attorney Krista Taggart said the city could foreclose on the Elona Biotechnologies facility within the next few weeks unless new investors take over the company. Greenwood officials three years ago approved $8.4 million of incentives for the project, including the construction loan. Elona said then it expected to employ some 70 workers and spend more than $25 million on a planned expansion. Elona told Greenwood officials of financial troubles in late January. In February, the company said it had reached a deal under which the company would be acquired by private investors.
Few observers believed WellPoint Inc.’s explanation that three of its directors all resigned within one week of each other for entirely “personal reasons.” But investors didn’t care. They bid up the Indianapolis-based health insurer’s stock price more than 2 percent last week after WellPoint disclosed the departures of Dr. Lenox Baker, Sheila Burke and Susan Bayh. Two outside observers cast the departures as a positive that allows new CEO Joseph Swedish, a veteran hospital executive, to put his stamp on the company. Institutional investors had criticized the board for a variety of matters, including its 2007 hiring of Angela Braly as CEO. After a series of missteps under Braly’s leadership, the board ousted her in August. “This is normal and it’s probably good for the company to clean out a few of the board members, especially given how long it took the board to come to the decision that it was time to remove the prior CEO,” Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told Bloomberg. “A new CEO always wants the full support of the board.” The company announced the departures just six weeks after Swedish’s hiring and two days before its annual meeting.
Mobile health apps could cut into state companies’ market share
The future of Indiana’s sprawling health care and life sciences industry might be threatened by an unlikely source: smartphone apps.
Grifter gets 19 months for fraud that hit Indy firms
Despite her dramatic pleas to a federal judge on Tuesday, Dina Wein Reis, who defrauded corporations out of millions of dollars, will go to prison.
Company news
Two new health clinics opened on the west side of Indianapolis last week. HealthNet Inc. opened a community health center on West 10th Street, providing primary, pediatric and OB/GYN care, as well as optomemtry, podiatry, behavioral health and social work services. Also, Community Health Network opened a medical office building in Speedway, which is part of its westward expansion after its acquisition of Westview Hospital on West 38th Street. The offices offer primary care, walk-in care, imaging, infusion therapy and occupational health services. Community also will work with the new Marian University College of Osteopathic Medicine to conduct training for medical residents in Speedway.
WellPoint Inc. is still considering former Amerigroup Corp. CEO James Carlson among several finalists to become CEO, Bloomberg News reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. The Indianapolis-based health insurer has delayed defining a role for Carlson, who joined WellPoint through its $4.9 billion acquisition of Amerigroup in December, because he is a contender for the top position, said the person, who asked for anonymity because the information is private. Retired Aetna Inc. CEO Ronald Williams also has been a leading candidate, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations. Carlson, 60, would replace Angela Braly, who was forced out in August amid investor complaints about the company's performance. Carlson built Amerigroup into one of the biggest insurers focused on the growing Medicaid sector. In an e-mail, Kristin Binns, a WellPoint spokeswoman, said the company wouldn’t comment on the CEO search. Maureen McDonnell, an Amerigroup spokeswoman, also declined to discuss the process or Carlson’s role. Katherine Mentus, a spokesman for Williams, declined to comment when reached by telephone. Analysts expect WellPoint to make a decision by the end of February.
Eli Lilly and Co. will have to conduct more studies of its experimental Alzheimer’s drug, but it is getting some outside help. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston chose Lilly’s drug solanezumab for a large federally funded study testing whether it's possible to prevent Alzheimer's disease in older people at high risk of developing it, according to the Associated Press. Lilly’s own studies of solanezumab found that it did not help people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's, but it showed some promise against milder disease. Researchers think it might work better if given before symptoms start. The new study will enroll 1,000 patients between age 70 and 85 who show a buildup of plaques in their brains but do not yet show signs of Alzheimer’s, including loss of memory and ability to do daily activities. Lilly’s solanezumab is also one of two drugs being studied in Alzheimer’s patients by researchers at Washington University. The other is made by the Genentech unit of Switzerland-based Roche Holding AG.
Indianapolis-based Defender Direct, a home security dealer, has opened an on-site health clinic, joining a number of other area employers that offer such services. Defender Direct’s 650 employees and their families now can receive primary care at the East 96th Street clinic, operated by Indianapolis-based OurHealth. Indianapolis-based MJ Insurance, which has helped such employers as Interactive Intelligence Inc. and others set up onsite clinics, brokered the deal.
Roche Diagnostics Corp. in Indianapolis ranks 89th on Fortune magazine’s latest annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For,” the magazine announced Thursday. In selecting Roche, the only Indiana company to appear on the list, Fortune cited its on-site medical clinic and fitness center, the company's $30,000 budget for intramural sports, and its health insurance plans tiered to income levels. The Indianapolis campus serves as the North American headquarters for the diagnostics business of Switzerland-based Roche Holding AG.
Roche makes Fortune’s ‘Best Companies’ list
Roche Diagnostics Corp. in Indianapolis ranks 89th on the magazine’s latest “Best Companies to Work For” list and was the only Indiana-based company selected.
Roche continues to restructure diabetes unit
Roche officials said last week that price competition and lower reimbursement rates are forcing it to make an unspecified number of cuts in its U.S. sales force and at its research and development hubs in Indianapolis and Germany.
Roche plans $300M expansion, 100 new jobs
Roche Diagnostics Corp. plans to spend $300 million on an expansion of its Indianapolis headquarters, creating 100 jobs by 2017, the company said Wednesday.
Company news
Shares of Endocyte Inc. more than doubled in value Monday morning after the company unveiled an up to $1 billion deal with Merck & Co. Inc. to bring an ovarian cancer drug to market. West Lafayette-based Endocyte’s stock had fallen 60 percent in the past 12 months. New Jersey-based Merck will pay Endocyte $120 million upfront with as much as $880 million in future payments possible based on regulatory approvals and sales of the drug EC145, also known as vitafolide. The agreement gives Merck worldwide commercial rights to EC145, in exchange for double-digit royalty payments to Endocyte. The two companies will split sales revenue and marketing costs in the United States. Endocyte already has begun studying EC145 as a potential lung cancer treatment, and intends to study it in still more applications. Merck also gained the rights to the drug for those other types of cancer. Chris Raymond, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., called the agreement “an amazing deal” for Endocyte.
Shareholders of Eli Lilly and Co. failed once gain to remove the drugmaker’s tough poison-pill provision against unwanted buyers. The proposal garnered 62.4 percent of the shares voted at Monday’s annual meeting of shareholders, according to preliminary voting results. To pass, the proposal needed support from the owners of 80 percent of Lilly’s shares. That means Lilly’s corporate bylaws still contain an 80-percent approval threshold for hostile takeover bids, even though the company’s board has recommended removing the policy in each of the past three years. The proposal that failed Monday would have required just a bare majority of shareholder votes to approve key moves commonly used in hostile takeovers. In the past two years, the same proposal received 74 percent and 73 percent of all shares, respectively. The supermajority vote requirement dates from the 1980s, the heyday of “corporate raiders” making unsolicited bids to buy public companies. Lilly’s board, which has been fiercely independent during multiple waves of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, finally began to support removing the high threshold in 2010. That decision followed three straight years in which a majority of Lilly shareholders expressed support for removing the supermajority voting requirements.
Roche Diagnostics Corp.’s North American sales rose 7 percent in the first quarter, to 615 million Swiss francs, or about $670 million in U.S. dollars, assuming constant exchange rates across the world. The Swiss company’s North American headquarters is in Indianapolis, along with a significant diabetes manufacturing operation. Diabetes sales in North America shrank in the quarter 5 percent, to 119 million Swiss francs, or $130 million. Roche’s sales of lab and testing equipment, and the equipment and chemicals that go with it, all saw double-digit growth in the quarter. Worldwide, Roche’s diagnostic sales grew 4 percent, in constant currencies, to $2.4 billion Swiss francs, or $2.6 billion.
Bloomington-based medical-device maker Cook Group acquired General BioTechnology LLC, an Indianapolis biotech company with about 20 employees. Terms of the deal were not announced. Cook will rename the company Cook General BioTechnology LLC. General BioTechnology was founded in 1997 by former Indiana University School of Medicine researchers. It operates an umbilical-cord blood and tissue bank for families called The Genesis Bank and a reproductive tissue bank called Genome Resources.
Biomet Inc.’s sales rose 5 percent in the three months ended Feb. 29, to nearly $709 million, compared with the same period a year ago. The growth was driven by increased volumes in North America and the Pacific Rim. The Warsaw-based orthopedic-implant maker’s financial results are always closely watched as an early signal for the rest of the industry, which will report first-quarter results later this month. Biomet’s sales of knee implants rose 4 percent and sales of its hip implants rose 6 percent, compared with the same quarter last year. The company’s operating income rose 14 percent, to $108.1 million, primarily due to lower amortization expenses recorded from the company’s 2007 buyout by private equity firms. Biomet has a whopping $5.3 billion in debt, which required interest payments in the quarter of $117 million. That expense and tax payments led Biomet to a loss for the quarter of $16.5 million, up from $11.6 million a year ago.
Company news
Indianapolis-based Strand Diagnostics LLC will receive up to $30 million in investment capital over the next three years from Los Angeles-based NantWorks LLC, a seed-stage investment firm, the companies announced last week. Strand Diagnostics makes the Know Error system, which uses bar coding and DNA matching to make sure biopsy samples are matched to the correct patients when submitted to its labs for testing. The investment capital will help it scale up its operations and sales efforts, the company said in a news release. NantWorks is the same company that announced in January it would sink $85.5 million into a former Pfizer Inc. plant in Terre Haute to produce injectable drugs for use in cancer patients and in critical care situations. NantWorks predicted the plant would employ 234 people by 2016. Strand Diagnostics, which operates a testing lab south of Indianapolis International Airport, launched Know Error in 2009. The company has 58 employees, with 48 of them in Indiana.
The Federal Trade Commission gave the OK to the marriage of Express Scripts Inc. and Medco Health Solutions Inc., two pharmacy benefit managers that combined employ 800 people in the Indianapolis area. The $29 billion deal, according to Bloomberg News, would create the nation’s biggest manager of prescription-drug benefits for corporate and government clients. But it is unclear how the merger will affect staffing at St. Louis-based Express Scripts' facility near Indianapolis International Airport and Medco’s distribution center near Whitestown. A combined Express-Medco would handle 34 percent of prescriptions in the U.S. this year, according to Adam Fein, president of Pembroke Consulting Inc. in Philadelphia, who is a consultant for Express Scripts. However, that share will shrink to 29 percent next year because Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc. switched from Medco to its own pharmacy benefits unit, OptumRx.
Federal authorities charged a Carmel man on Friday with using his Indianapolis business to defraud the Indiana Medicaid program of more than $1 million. Donald Hamilton, 49, allegedly used his company, Hamilton Medical Inc., to generate false invoices showing that compression stockings for another of his companies, Indianapolis-based Compression Etc., cost almost three times what he paid for them. Hamilton sent invoices to the Indiana Medicaid program for reimbursement for an amount much higher than allowed by law, according to charges announced by Joseph Hogsett, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana. He said the investigation was a collaborative effort among the Department of Health and Human Services, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigations unit and the Indiana Attorney General’s Medicaid fraud control unit.
Roche Diagnostics Corp. plans to eliminate about 80 information technology jobs at its Indianapolis-area campus over the next two years. The first round of reductions is to be completed by June 30. The IT workers are actually part of Roche Group’s global pharmaceutical informatics unit, but live in the Indianapolis area, said Roche spokeswoman Julie Bower. Roche employs about 3,000 people at its Indianapolis and Fishers facilities. The company’s worldwide headquarters are in Basel, Switzerland.
Warsaw-based orthopedic implant maker Biomet Inc. agreed to pay $22.7 million to settle allegations that it bribed government-employed doctors in Argentina, Brazil and China for more than eight years to win business with hospitals. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlements March 26. Biomet will pay a $17.3 million criminal penalty but won't be prosecuted by the Justice Department if it institutes strict internal controls to prevent bribery and hires an expert to monitor its compliance for 18 months. Biomet, which operates in about 90 countries, also agreed to pay $5.4 million in restitution to resolve the SEC's civil charges. Biomet is the third medical device company—in addition to New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson and U.K.-based Smith & Nephew plc—to pay a criminal penalty and sign a deferred-prosecution agreement in the government's investigation into bribery by medical device makers of doctors employed by governments overseas.
Roche sales rise 4 percent in 2011
Roche Diagnostics Corp.’s North American business, which is headquartered in Indianapolis, posted a 4-percent boost in sales last year on the strength of its fluid analyzer business unit, even though its diabetes sales fell.
City set to cancel tax abatement for medical device firm
Polymer Technology Systems said in 2007 that it would make a $3 million investment at its operation on Zionsville Road and create 110 jobs.
Company news
Roche Diagnostics Corp. is ramping up cargo shipments between the U.S. and Europe, securing a third weekly Cargolux flight at Indianapolis International Airport to ship its medical products overseas. The flight, which began Jan. 15, is the first scheduled Cargolux flight to depart Indianapolis and fly nonstop to Europe–opening up new export capabilities from central Indiana. Currently, Cargolux Airlines International operates two inbound flights from Luxembourg to Indianapolis, each Wednesday and Friday. Boeing 747 freighters typically take on Roche’s chemical reagents and medical devices and then stop in Chicago or other cities before heading back to Europe. The outbound Boeing 747 will have room for additional cargo, which Roche hopes to grow into, but it also could be used by other companies shipping products to Europe. Roche, based in Switzerland, operates its North American headquarters out of Indianapolis.
AIT Laboratories, one of the area’s fastest-growing companies in recent years, is now eliminating jobs. The Indianapolis-based forensics and clinical testing company won’t say how many, but officials admit its business got pinched in 2011 and now it is trying to restructure. “AIT has seen reimbursement from government and private payers reduced throughout 2011, which has had a negative financial impact on the company,” CEO Michael Evans said in a prepared statement. The job cuts are a turnabout from 2010, when AIT said it planned to create as many as 160 positions by 2014 and invest $74 million to equip a 90,000-square-foot building at Woodland Corporate Park as a new headquarters and lab. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered AIT up to $1.8 million in performance-based tax credits to help with the expansion. AIT had boasted as many as 500 employees recently. Some pharmacy industry websites have been buzzing with talk about “massive” job cuts at AIT, with claims of as many as 100 furloughs. AIT officials would not confirm or deny those numbers.
A California-based pharmaceutical company says it expects to hire 234 people by 2016 at a new operation on the site of a former Pfizer Inc. drug plant on the south side of Terre Haute. NantWorks LLC plans to invest $85.5 million to redevelop the facility. The manufacturing plant, which is expected to be operational in 2015, will produce cancer drugs and injectable medicines for use in critical care settings. Pfizer employed more than 800 workers at the site before closing in 2008. NantWorks officials say scientists, chemists and engineers employed by the plant will earn an average annual salary of about $51,000.
Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings Inc. acquired Synvasive Technology Inc., which makes Stablecut surgical saw blades and a soft tissue balancing system for knees. Zimmer did not disclose the price it paid for Synvasive, a privately held company based in Reno, Nev. Zimmer has annual sales of more than $4 billion and sells its orthopedic implants in more than 25 countries.
At long last, Roche wins approval of Nano
The OK for a new blood glucose monitor comes more than two years after FDA officials declined to approve a previous version of the Nano, which in rare cases generated inflated blood sugar readings because it did not distinguish properly between the sugars glucose and maltose.
Filing: Roche considered leaving Indy
It’s hard to believe now, but as recently as two years ago, Indianapolis was close to losing its 15th-largest employer. Roche Diagnostics Corp. was looking seriously at moving its 2,900-employee North American headquarters out of Indianapolis.
Marsh wins $19.5M judgment against Roche
A Hamilton Superior Court judge awarded damages to the local supermarket chain in a soured sublease deal it signed with Roche Diagnostics in March 2008.
Glucose monitor deal helps Roche catch up
Roche Diagnostics will partner with a San Diego firm to incorporate its continuous glucose monitoring sensor with a wireless handheld device Roche is developing to help diabetics test their blood sugar and track their glucose levels throughout the day.