Lilly Endowment awarded $230 million in 2012, mostly to Indiana groups. Its fortunes still are largely tied to the value of Eli Lilly and Co. stock, despite an effort to diversify the private foundation’s holdings.
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.
One month into Joe Swedish's tenure as CEO of WellPoint Inc., he and the communications staff set up an interview with me. That was quite different from my experience with Angela Braly, who declined all of my interview requests in her 63 months as CEO.
St. Vincent Health will lay off an unspecified number of employees across its 22-hospital network by June 30 in a cost-saving move the hospital blamed on Obamacare, cuts to Medicare reimbursement, and lower-than-expected volumes of patient procedures. Indianapolis-based St. Vincent, which is the second-largest hospital system in Indiana, employs nearly 18,000 workers. The Catholic organization is the sixth-largest employer in the state. St. Vincent spokesman Johnny Smith on May 23 declined to give an estimate of the number of people who will lose their jobs in the restructuring, saying St. Vincent executives had more work to do to discern which positions to eliminate. He said the job losses would be among both permanent workers and contract employees. He also said St. Vincent will look for expense reductions in its administrative functions, supply purchasing, and programs and services. He said he could not provide specific examples at this time. Other hospitals have been cutting expenses, too. Indiana University Health, the state’s largest hospital system, earlier this year delayed plans to expand its Methodist Hospital downtown. Also, IU Health CEO Dan Evans has said the hospital system intends to cut $1 billion—or more than 20 percent of its expenses—over the next four years, which would likely include staff reductions. Also, Community Health Network has cut out more than $100 million in annual expenses since 2009. It hopes to trim out a total of $300 million by 2015.
Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. was one of 13 insurers selected to participate in California’s state health exchange, according to Bloomberg News. The selection is important for WellPoint, because the exchanges are likely to become the most common way its large numbers of individual and small-business customers buy insurance in the future. While the premiums the insurers will charge vary widely depending on a person’s location and income, the director of the exchange said May 23 that premium increases will be less than the 30-percent jump projected by consulting company Milliman Inc. However, few other states have followed California in having the state government be an “active purchaser” of health plans, which may help hold down premiums more than in other states’ exchanges.
Eli Lilly and Co. signed its fourth deal in the past year with a company to help it produce companion diagnostics to accompany its experimental drugs. On May 23, Denver-based Corgenix Medical Corp. announced that it would collaborate with Indianapolis-based Lilly for diagnostic tests to identify the patients most helped by Lilly’s experimental cancer drugs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nearly a year ago, Lilly inked a deal with Massachusetts-based PrimeraDx to develop companion diagnostics for cancer and other types of drugs. Then in January, Lilly signed on to a similar arrangement wth Dako, a Denmark-based unit of California-based Agilent Technologies Inc. And in February, Lilly said it was expanding its partnership with Germany-based Qiagen, N.V., to develop companion diagnostics for all kinds of drugs. Qiagen already helped Lilly and New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. develop a test to identify subsets of patients that benefit most from the cancer drug Erbitux.
When will Indiana become known as a state that welcomes all regardless of sexual orientation?
The study results, which will be released Monday afternoon, are part of Indianapolis-based Lilly’s campaign to get Medicare to pay for use of its brain imaging agent Amyvid.
It’s no secret that CEOs of public companies make a lot of money.<br><br>And in general, they earn it: It takes talent, hard work and vision to oversee thousands of employees, answer to impatient shareholders, guard against competitive threats, and keep the trains running on time, particularly at behemoths like Eli Lilly and Co., WellPoint Inc., Cummins Inc. and Simon Property Group Inc.
Eli Lilly claims recent decisions by Canadian courts invalidating 17 drug patents have made the country an outlier among major developed countries.
American Realty Capital, a real estate investment firm based in New York City, bought the building on South Meridian Street occupied by Rolls Royce Corp. Lilly vacated the facility in 2010.
The future of Indiana’s sprawling health care and life sciences industry might be threatened by an unlikely source: smartphone apps.
The five-year program is designed to transform the Indianapolis Museum of Art into a more visitor-centered institution. The first year will include enhancements to the upcoming Matisse show.
Eli Lilly and Co. CEO John Lechleiter underwent a scheduled surgery Monday for a heart defect, and the repair to the aorta is functioning as intended, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker said.
In a case that could have affected Dow AgroSciences LLC and companies developing biotech drugs, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.'s claim that an Indiana farmer violated the company's patents on soybean seeds that are resistant to its weed killer. The justices, in a unanimous vote Monday, rejected farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman’s argument that cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator are not covered by the Monsanto patents, even though most of them also were genetically modified to resist the company's Roundup herbicide. Justice Elena Kagan said a farmer who buys patented seeds must have the patent holder's permission. Monsanto has a policy to protect its investment in seed development that prohibits farmers from saving or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farmers must buy new seeds every year. The case had been closely watched by researchers and businesses holding patents on DNA molecules, nanotechnologies and other self-replicating technologies. But Kagan said the court's holding only "addresses the situation before us."
Warner Transitional Services LLC, a 10-month-old company that provides services to adults with developmental disabilities, plans to cease operations this summer, putting 112 employees out of work. The Indianapolis-based firm plans to terminate employment for 102 of its employees on June 7. The other 10 will remain with the company for less than another month to help wind down operations. Warner relies on funds from the Indiana Family and Social Administration, but FSSA recently decided to end that funding after numerous complaints against the company went unresolved. More than half of the employees affected are direct care professionals, a title usually held by nursing assistants or personal care aides. Warner is a subsidiary of Oconomowoc, Wis.-based Oconomowoc Residential Programs Inc., which operates several therapeutic, residential and in-home services businesses in the Midwest.
John Lechleiter temporarily relinquished the reins of Eli Lilly and Co. on Monday while he undergoes and recovers from cardiovascular surgery. Derica Rice, Lilly’s chief financial officer, will become acting CEO in Lechleiter’s absence. And Ellen Marram, lead independent director on Lilly’s board of directors, will be acting chairman. Lechleiter, 59, has been suffering from a dilated aorta, which is a swelling that can cause a rupture and bleeding in the main artery that carries blood from the heart. The company said the problem was discovered during unrelated testing and has not produced visible symptoms. Lechleiter will undergo a procedure in Indianapolis in which a portion of his aorta will be removed and replaced with a graft, said Lilly spokesman Ed Sagebiel. He will be recuperating for months, but is expected to return to the company “later this summer,” depending on the pace of his recovery. Rice, 48, has been Lilly’s CFO since 2006 and executive vice president of global services since 2010. He is the highest-ranking African-American executive at Lilly.
Former WellPoint Inc. CEO Angela Braly has been named by Gov. Mike Pence to serve as a board member of the Indiana Economic Development Corp. The appointment is the first high-profile post that Braly, 51, has accepted since she was ousted from the top spot at the Indianapolis-based health insurer in August. Braly’s tenure leading WellPoint was rocky, in part because WellPoint was painted by President Obama’s administration as the poster child of health insurance abuses during the lengthy debate of the president’s health reform law. Financial and operational missteps ultimately led investors to demand Braly’s ouster last summer. In February, WellPoint hired Joe Swedish, a longtime hospital executive, to replace Braly. WellPoint is Indiana's largest public company, ranking No. 47 on the new Fortune 500 list.
R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, has been awarded the biennial Dreyfus Prize for advancements in mass spectrometry. Cooks will receive $250,000 and a medal. Cooks created a new way to analyze chemicals in their natural environment, without having to put them in a vacuum tube. The technique allowed for chemical analysis of fingerprints at crime scenes, and was incorporated into the storyline of an episode of the TV show "CSI: Miami" in 2008.
Julie Lappas has joined Hall Render Killian Heath & Lyman’s Indianapolis office, helping health care providers comply with federal and state anti-kickback, privacy and licensure laws. Lappas previously worked as a sales representative at Eli Lilly and Co., before earning her law degree at The George Washington University Law School. She also holds a bachelor’s from Indiana University.
The drug, enzastaurin, was in the most advanced stage of testing and had been expected to generate $260 million in annual sales by 2018.
Credit unions last year posted record earnings, thanks largely to lower loan-loss reserves, as well as to growing memberships, growing debit cards, selling off mortgages and stealing business loans away from banks, their arch rivals.
Five of the six Hoosier firms that appear in the 2013 rankings slipped from their positions in last year’s list of the largest U.S. companies.
John Lechleiter has been suffering from a dilated aorta, Eli Lilly and Co. said Monday. Current CFO Derica Rice will take his place until later this summer.
The effort to launch the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute got $25 million from the Legislature, but the life sciences institutions backing the effort have set their funding sights much higher.
