REVENUE STRATEGY - GENENTECH

1. Genentech espouses a radical set of management principles: Stay focused on the science. Tune out Wall Street's insistence on short-term profits. And leap at new drug opportunities "that other people think stink."
2. It had once increased research spending to 50% of the company's sales—more than twice what most drug companies spend on R&D resulting in a stream of hit drugs pushing sales up from $1 billion to $9 billion since 1999
3. It is taking on one of the most treacherous areas of medicine - diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and more than 80 other ailments that arise when the immune system becomes deranged, attacking the very tissues and organs it's supposed to protect.
4. It took insights of British physician Jonathan Edwards on its cancer drug Rituxan, that the drug's method of annihilating cancer-causing cells might also ease the agony of rheumatoid arthritis.
5. Its scientists rethought everything they knew about how the body's defense mechanisms go astray.
6. It launched a program to study the drug as a possible treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, MS, and lupus.
7. It deployed a third of its 1,000 researchers to pursue new drugs to fight autoimmune disease.
8. Its scientific journey has been guided by executives who more closely resemble the staff of an academic medical center.
9. It tries to hire scientists who could win the Nobel Prize not just someone who will do a good job.
10. Its CEO gets deeply involved in research even when it isn't anywhere close to yielding marketable products.
11. It has redesigned its Rituxan trials, building in extra patient checkups in hopes that physicians would spot dangerous side effects fast. It carefully tracks patients after they leave clinical trials.
12. It is looking for clues that will help "personalize" new drugs to groups of patients that are most likely to respond
13. It hired five autoimmune specialists from a single lab at the University of Minnesota to better match patients with drugs, 14. It is working on some completely new approaches to autoimmune disease considering ideas others might overlook.

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