Some Good News in Biotech

I could easily blog about how badly biopharma is performing in this bear market, how all of the big pharma stocks hit new lows this morning with the lone exception of AstraZeneca (Update: AstraZeneca is no longer an exception. AZN has now joined the rest of the big pharma stocks touching new lows today.)

But there's enough gloom and doom out there so, I'm going to write about a little good news for a bunch of companies in the sector.

The journal "Science" is out with its annual ranking of the best biopharma employers. And Genentech (DNA) has grabbed the top position again. It had been #1 for the first five years of the survey, but fell to #2 last year, behind Boehringer Ingelheim which dropped to #4 this year. As an aside, shares of DNA were briefly halted for trading this morning. According to Dow Jones it was due to an imbalance.

Our guy on the NYSE floor, Bob Pisani, told me there was some buzz about Roche (RHHBY.PK) having secured the financing to do the Genentech deal, but if that were the case wouldn't you think the stock would head in the other direction? Anyway, back to the survey.

Nearly 4,000 people took it in April and May of this year (long before Roche made a play for Genentech, so you can't argue this was a Genentech get-out-the-vote - to-show-how-special-we-really-are campaign). Thirty eight percent of them worked for biotech, 34 percent for pharma, 14 percent for biopharma and the rest in "other life sciences organizations". And they're highly educated and experienced.

Seventy percent had a Ph.D., MD or both. And almost two-thirds had been working in the industry for at least a decade. Sixty-two percent picked the company they work for as the best and they scored companies on nearly two dozen "driving characteristics." This year the top six "driving characteristics" are: 1. innovative leader in the industry, 2. social responsibility, 3. employee loyalty, 4. employer respect for employees, 5. leadership moving the company in the right direction (that one broke into the top six this year) and 6. work and personal values are aligned.

Peter Gwynne, who authored the piece wrote, "For the first time a company outside the mainstream pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical business has reached the pinnacle of top employers." That'd be Monsanto (MON), which jumped from #8 in 2007 to #2 in 2008. The rest of the top 10 are Genzyme (GENZ), the aforementioned Boehringer, followed by Schering-Plough (SGP), Roche, EMD Serono, Inc., Millennium (which has been bought by Japan's Takeda), Gilead Sciences (GILD) and Eli Lilly (LLY). Lilly is so proud of breaking into the top tier that it put out a press release about it. Pfizer (PFE) and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) are the only two big pharmas that didn't crack the top 20.