Tom Branna, my editorial director, walked into my office in the summer of 1999, tossed a folder onto my desk, and announced, “Good news! We’re launching a new magazine and you’re going to be the editor!” (That’s how I remember it, although Tom may’ve actually structured it as a “Good News / Bad News” statement.)

The folder held the pages of the new magazine’s business plan. It opened with:

“Well!” I thought, reading page after page of the plan. “I’m not sure what all this means exactly, but it sounds like it’ll make an interesting read!” And my education began.

A few months later, we published the debut issue of Contract Pharma. Explaining its mission, I wrote on this very page:


Both my florid prose and my and reliance on list-making were on display early, but I’m heartened to discover that I had some idea of what I was writing about back then. (Sure, I had my share of silly ideas – who can forget the concept that “one-stop shopping” was the wave of the future? – but it’s not like I was the only one to fall for them.)

I’ve shared a lot with you through this page: my wedding, my bad jokes and twisted metaphors, my joys and trials as a dog owner, 9/11, my literary ruminations, and, ofcourse, my theorizing on pharma/biopharma, how it does business, and where it may go. What I learned as I read over my past columns is that none of my targets, personal or professional, can be pinned down.

I’ve undergone a world of change this decade, and our industry and its models have shifted countless times, even if the foundation is (largely) unchanged. In some ways, both From the Editor and Contract Pharma overall are an ongoing conversation about moving subjects, an attempt at capturing in words something that’s Protean in nature.

I mean, do you remember 1999? Along with the debut album of Britney Spears, the year brought us Y2K panic, a genomics (and subsequent -omics) revolution, a dot-com boom, and plenty of other notions and predictions that didn’t exactly pan out. What assumptions were made about outsourcing trends based on models that would later prove faulty?

Sure, I mentioned “merger mania” in that first editorial, but one look at that issue’s Top of the News page tells us that it never went away; five of the six news items were about Aventis, Ivax, Millennium, Pharmacia & Upjohn, and Schering-Plough. (For what it’s worth, the sixth item was about Abbott.)

The same factors I cited in that first editorial are still present (overshadowed by patent expirations), still forcing pharma and biopharma companies to reckon with “in-house vs. outsource” strategies. And we’re still here to try to help you make sense of it.

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P.S.: It’s happened 95 (!) times since Tom Branna gave me the news about Contract Pharma, but I still get a thrill when the latest issue of the magazine arrives at the office. There’s something about holding a tangible manifestation of one’s work, of picking up a magazine and knowing, “I helped make this.”

(In the same vein, I get a little verklempt each year when I see hundreds and hundreds of people gathered for our annual Contracting & Outsourcing event.)

I want to use this space to thank everyone involved in making Contract Pharma a decade-long hit, but the list would be too long. This success of this magazine comes from the interaction of its staff, its board, its advertisers, and, most importantly, you, dear readers.

Rather than publish our entire circulation list and our roster of advertisers, I’m going to give thanks to the people who are most responsible for making this magazine what it is today: Gary Durr, Damaris Kope, Kristin Brooks, and Lisa St. Charles. It’s an honor to work with them.

Thanks for a great first decade!

(I’ll get back to the bad jokes, twisted metaphors and dog photos next issue.)

Gil Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its debut in 1999.