Those who follow the pharmaceutical blogosphere may be pleased to know that Ed Silverman's Pharmalot is back online, though in a less-prolific manner.

--PWT

Michele V. Wagner just assessed the state of the pharma blogosphere, and found that, within the past year, nine pharma companies have started Twitter feeds (where it took a good five years for GSK's, J&J's and Centocor's official blogs to take root and gain traction).  Some companies have a policy of following their followers, others don't. Here's her analysis.  Which begs the question: Are pharma blogs quietly slipping away into oblivion?

Susan Boyle apparently suffered an anxiety attack after the final installment of "U.K.'s Got Talent," so if anyone needs another inspiring story of someone who is following the beat of his or her own drummer, and who seems to be enjoying it....here's former Merck marketing manager and now full-time viral video comedian, Nalts, who has left the corporate world to pursue his true calling.  Click here for more.

Everyone, including Colbert and Jon Stewart, likes to take pot shots at Twitter.

I don’t know about you, but the relentless drum beat of negative news has been getting to me lately.  Every day seems to bring news of some drastic four-figure layoff...er, restructuring, whether in pharma or other industries.

A nice discussion recently on BNET with J&J's Joe Natale, who is heading up J&J's first foray into website entrepreneurship.

LabJabPharma.com, a new forum, aims to do for R&D what Cafe Pharma does for sales.  There are other more formal forums, like the AAAS career forum that are currently very active, but this one is focused on pharma and appears to be modelled after Cafe Pharma.

Since it's so new, it's a "clean slate" right now. But why not take a few minutes to write in some night when issues at work become frustrating and some peer advice would be useful and get a discussion started?  You'll find it here.

I'm curious to know whether pharma's scientists would choose to express themselves, when communicating anonymously online, like some of their counterparts in sales? (As in "$%^& that $%^&*@# technician who destroyed my $%^&*@# assay..." Somehow I doubt it.  But who knows...maybe some of the worst, most prolific ranters on Cafe Pharma aren't sales people)

That's how Control magazine's executive editor Jim Montague described the pharmaceutical industry in a recent and very memorable op-ed (read it here), in which he interviews experts including E-55 insider Gawayne Mahboubian-Jones. Jim brings to the the "so what" detachment of one who has covered PAT and process control as it has advanced in other industries over the years. We may appear to be a bit "gee wiz" on the subjects, if only to encourage the adoption of PAT and the open discussions of best practices, but Jim makes great points.

An accompanying review of pharmaceutical PAT asks whether it's a silver bullet for pharma?  (The bullet was used, in legend, to kill the devil or werewolves...in the case of pharma, it's killing a Frankenstein monster of pharma's own creation, paralyzed on the lab table ---although FDA played a major role in the vignette...which role....Igor? Remember Marty Feldman and Abbie Normal? Sniff. What was once a great Mel Brooks film is now another overblown Broadway musical).   Our own recent survey of pharma op ex practices found an uptick in pharma PAT adoption...although PAT is no longer the top motto (it's now Quality by Design, as enabled by PAT)

Noticed that a number of great blogs are blogging from BIO 2008.  Patent Baristas has entitled its blog "The Road to BIO".  I'm still on that road tonight, quite literally, having made the decision to take the younger children with me on a road trip that started last week...beautiful stretches in New Mexico, particularly....but long stretches. 

Had hoped to be able to cover both Honeywell User's Group in Phoenix and BIO, but their schedules overlap completely....fortunately, our colleagues on Control have promised to help us provide coverage of HUG's extremely interesting pharma and biopharma track.  BTW, Control's   editor-in-chief, Walt Boyes, was very recently elected an ISA Fellow.

Just wanted to update this blog a bit; time has been extremely scarce, so I marvel at steady bloggers (Pharmagossip, Pharmalot, Mack et al), at our competitors (PharmTech editors are doing a nice job) and at Christiane Truelove and Bob Ehrlich who are now doing daily updates and e-newsletters on pharma blogging.  

Will be heading off to BIO next week and attempting  to provide a somewhat steady feed of impressions from the show.  For the first year, the group has launched an official blog, with FaceBook and LinkedIn groups, and a repository of photos on FlickR.  The organization is also making it easier for reporters to podcast and video at the show.   Maybe other pharma organizations should take note.

Maybe I'll run into one or two of you there?

Since it is Friday, and the end of another busy week, thought I'd leave you with something completely different....ever have one of those "whatever happened to so-and-so" moments?  I'd been wondering recently about why we never seemed to hear from Chris De Burgh....well-known in the 1980s, he wrote and performed some nice songs with nice, atmospheric lyrics.  Of course, he's Irish....best known in the states for "Lady in Red" (not one of his better songs), he is now singing in other, perhaps misunderstood parts of the world which share some characteristics with Irish culture: love of poetry and music, predominance (at times in their histories) of religious orthodoxy....for more, read on and watch.   Perhaps this may help end some stereotypes---please note the backup singers.

Until next week
AMS 

Interrupting coverage of the Green Chemistry conference (should anyone be reading it on a gorgeous late May Friday)

We've drunk deeply of the Toyota Production System kool-aid around here, but shouldn't there still be room for serendipity?   As Lee Proctor, Technical Director of Phoenix Chemical in the U.K. proposed yesterday at the New Haven Green Processing conference: Perhaps the concept of "Right First Time "is wrong.  In order to learn, you need to fail fast, learn from the failures and apply the lessons to the next problem.

In his blog, In the Pipeline, drug discovery scientist Derek Lowe recently took good-natured aim at the well-meaning people who try to apply "ISO whatever-thousand, umpteem-sigma, Quality Assurance Tiger Team Circle Continuous Improvement Metrics, or what have you" to drug discovery. "Harm generally ensues," he writes.  (hmmmm.  that first sentence could apply to the article topics in any one of our magazine issues. )

For more, read on.

Dr Lowe's working in drug discovery and he should know. But surely something has to give where development, scale-up and manufacturing are concerned.  Why should it take 10 years and $1 billion dollars to develop a me-too drug that's not particularly necessary, or a "blockbuster" that doesn't do anything, an ingenious product that nobody wants, a la Exubera, or, worst of all, a Vioxx.

But I'm just a magazine editor. What do you in the "gemba" (the place where truth will be found---whether that's a plant floor, a laboratory, or a crime scene) think?  Write in and let us know.

I confess that I'm getting hooked on all this Japanese and becoming a Toyota nerd....I'm envisioning a best seller that would apply all these concepts to daily life.  A kind of Erma Bombeck meets Shingo.  After all, what could beat the optimism of kaizen (useful when you see that your son still hasn't cleaned his room, but has managed to remove his toys from the living room floor); 5-S, which can guide the cleaning of that room, poka yoke, stickers or other visual devices that will help ensure that haven't forgotten to sign any one of the 30 permission notes for school activities and programs. 

Bring it on!

AMS