Abbott Laboratories Chief Executive Miles White’s spending spree on pharmaceutical research and development has made the company an employment hot spot in the drug and biotech industries.
The North Chicago-based maker of drugs and other medical products this year plans to hire 500 scientists at its operations around the world, a company record. That’s double the number of scientists the company hired last year, which Abbott said was also a record and a significant increase from previous years.
The hiring binge comes after White last year dramatically increased the company’s drug research budget to more than $1 billion, largely due to the company’s $6.9 billion acquisition of BASF AG’s Knoll Pharmaceutical unit.
Although White said Abbott always has had talented researchers, the company would have had difficulty attracting the same quality of scientists to its drug business before the Knoll deal increased spending on pharmaceutical R&D by 50 percent.
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Abbott, for example, has been able to lure away key hires from other drug companies.
Alejandro Aruffo, who was vice president of cardiovascular and metabolic drug discovery at New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., was named president of the Abbott Bioresearch Center in Worcester, Mass. Aruffo replaces Robert Kamen, who is retiring from the top post but will remain a consultant at Abbott.
Abbott also recently hired Dr. Charles Fisher from Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly as divisional vice president of global pharmaceutical development.
At Lilly, Fisher led early clinical trials in the development of that company’s popular new drug Xigris, which is used to treat severe sepsis, the body’s overreaction to infection.
“If you are going to spend in excess of $1 billion on R&D, the management of the decision process is very important,” White said in an interview last week. “The acquisition brought to us even more scientific talent and a much richer pipeline . . . and made us more attractive to talent in our industry.”
Ravenswood buyout? A noted group of neurologists and neurosurgeons that last year moved to Advocate Ravenswood Medical Center is interested in purchasing the North Side hospital, but doesn’t have money to make the deal happen, a company working with the physicians said.
Meanwhile, Ravenswood parent Advocate Health Care said it is entertaining several options for the hospital.
Advocate isn’t ruling out a possible closure of the facility, which piled up a loss of more than $35 million on operations last year.
Oak Brook-based Advocate wouldn’t comment on specific plans for Ravenswood, including whether it had other suitors or whether the hospital would be further consolidated with its other North Side operations.
One clearly interested party is the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch Medical Group, which last year relocated its practice to Ravens-wood from the now-closed Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park. But Tom Hodson, chief executive of Chicago-based NeuroSource Inc., which helps neurosurgeons and neurologists expand their practices, said the group doesn’t have a banker and hasn’t secured financing to buy the hospital.
Advocate, which operates nine hospitals in the Chicago area, has one other hospital on the North Side–Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where certain Ravenswood operations have been moved in the past.