It was originally posted well-over ten years ago, at 3:11 pm on a snowy December 16, 2011, as I recall. The original title was “Ex-Merck Guy To Clear Path, For Ex-Abbott Guy — At Vertex“… and here — long after the FDA Hep C next-gen approvals, and multi-billion dollar US pharma market dominance battles… it is suddenly the focus of many a search engine query.

But why? I am eternally curious about such things… as almost all the hits are inside the US… and over 70 per cent of those 11,000 or so hits… originated from servers based in Tennessee. HCA and Frist are both substantial presences there. But that is simply a… guess. I do draw a fair bit of traffic on my older stuff, from time to time — but this is about ten times what I would normally expect, here at a decade later. Especially since it didn’t make specific predictions — the ones that did, tend to get traffic well past six years, in steady numbers. [People checking up on my “Nostra-could-be-damus” efforts, I guess. Heh.]

In any event, here is the entirety of that item (really just a “revolving doors” in pharma one — I didn’t even fully name him — and now at least one of the current news reports is no longer retrievable). The ex-Merck guy was named Emmens. Odd:

This is a much tighter circle than the first-glance “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” usual game might otherwise suggest, here — especially given that Vertex’s closest current competitor is Merck itself (well, okay — technically, it’s legacy Schering-Plough, but you know what I mean). [See, Incivek^® posts here.]

Here is more, per this morning’s Boston Herald — do go read it all, there — this is a bit of it:

…The front-office shuffle comes as the Cambridge-based company — now building a massive new waterfront headquarters in Boston’s Seaport District — prepares to bring its second drug to market. The Food and Drug Administration has agreed to expedite its review of the first potential treatment targeting the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis.

A board member since 2009, Leiden is a managing director at Clarus Ventures in Cambridge. He previously was president of Abbott Laboratories and has experience as a practicing cardiologist….

Indeed. I still think Vertex has been oversold by Wall Street — it has a clear path (leading the Hep C next-gen state of the art) until at least 2015, in my estimation.

Ed. Note: Huh. Maybe it is that last bit… dunno — but that did turn out true.
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