PARIS--A few days ago, I was tooling through my email queue and came across a tip. AstraZeneca's anti-infectives unit, which had been shopped around for more than a year, was coming to a crossroads. Potential buyers had been kicking the tires, but there was no deal along the lines that the pharma giant had wanted. And the company couldn't wait forever to come up with a final solution for a unit that once employed 175 people in Waltham, MA.
I checked it out with some sources of mine, who helped fill in some of the gaps. And I published a behind-the-scenes look at the spinout talks over the weekend.
Whether it's a reorg at a big company like Sanofi or GlaxoSmithKline, or a biotech like Constellation, I rely quite a bit on the big global network of readers we've gathered over the past 13 years to keep me posted on the things that companies don't put in a press release. And with Twitter and LinkedIn and a subscriber base of more than 275,000 readers, I'm connected to new information networks that can flag news instantaneously to a huge and fast-growing global audience.
So if you come across something of interest about global biopharma, I'd like you on the Fierce team. And I do mean global. I'm in Paris this week, after a week in London. And I'm headed to Singapore and Shanghai next month.
Drop me a line at [email protected] if you hear something that I should follow up on. This may be from an old colleague or your boss. And maybe you wouldn't want to be quoted on it. But I have a 37-year track record at keeping exchanges like this confidential. And I guarantee you I'll do everything I can to nail it down. -- John Carroll (email | Twitter)