September 29, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Indianapolis – There’s been an entire round of changes at the executive level for Eli Lilly and Company .
They are at least somewhat caused by the announced retirement of three senior leaders. Maria Crowe, president of manufacturing operations, will retire in December 2017. She’s been with Lilly since 1982 and headed its global manufacturing operations since 2012. Jan Lundberg, executive vice president for science and technology and president of Lilly Research Labs, will retire at the end of May 2018. Lundberg has been with Lilly for eight years. Before that he was with AstraZeneca for 10 years. In addition, the company’s chief financial officer, Derica Rice, will retire at the end of this year.
John Carroll, writing for Endpoints News,writes, “The question now is whether Lundberg—who also led discovery research at AstraZeneca before making the leap to Lilly—will actually go ahead and retire or simply jump to a new job after a decent interval, a path followed by a growing number of senior execs who have found new careers in the comforting arms of a booming VC community.”
Josh Smiley will replace Rice as chief financial officer. Smiley will also become senior vice president and a member of the company’s executive committee, effective January 1, 2018.
Dan Skovronsky has been promoted to senior vice president for science and technology, and president of Lilly Research Labs. He will also become a member of the executive committee. This will go into effect June 1, 2018.
Carroll wrote, “Skovronsky—most recently the development chief at Lilly—joined the company back in 2010, when Lechleiter bought out Avid Radiopharmaceuticals in order to get its hands on a brain-imaging technology that could highlight beta-amyloid in the brain. Lilly has spent years and a fortune pursuing new ways to alter the trajectory of Alzheimer’s, with nothing to show for it so far.”
Myles O’Neill will become senior vice president and president of manufacturing operations, as well as a member of the executive committee. This goes into effect January 1, 2018.
Aarti Shah, the company’s senior vice president and chief information officer, has been named an executive officer and will join the Lilly executive committee on Jan. 1. The company notes that, “Positioning the information technology function as a direct report to the CEO is critical given the role digital technology and analytics will play in the future of healthcare.”
“Joining our executive team are individuals who have the experience, expertise and leadership skills to build on our momentum of innovation driven volume growth,” said David Ricks, Lilly’s chairman and chief executive officer, in a statement. “Importantly, this team will help us maintain focus as we work to bring forward new medicines in diabetes, cancer, immunology, neurodegeneration and pain and change the path of serious diseases.”
Carroll points out that, “Eli Lilly has made a shifting set of promises on the R&D front, without actually delivering right on schedule. One of the latest updates on that score included a promise of 20 new drugs approvals in a decade run stretching from 2014 to 2023. Ricks also has been changing up the pipeline focus somewhat, while cutting into the staff in a move to reduce costs by eliminating 8.5 percent of its employee roster.”
