Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17181

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Goldstein J
Eli Lilly Exec Heads to Harvard Med School
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2010 Feb 10
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/02/10/eli-lilly-exec-heads-to-harvard-med-school/

Full text:

William Chin, Eli Lilly’s senior VP for discovery and clinical research, is going to take a newly created job at Harvard Medical School.

He’ll be the “executive dean for research.” It sounds like at least part of his job will be figuring out how Harvard researchers should interact with industry, as well as working to move research from the lab to the clinic. Here’s a key chunk of a letter posted online today by the med school’s senior dean:

One of Bill’s highest priorities will be to conceptualize and develop new research initiatives, such as the therapeutics discovery initiative, envisioned as a focused and innovative effort to bring together the enormous expertise of our community in order to find effective new ways for transforming the world’s most vital biomedical research into therapies that can directly improve human health. Bill will also develop a coherent strategy for the School’s scientific interactions with industry, ensuring it is both aligned with the HMS Faculty Policy on Conflicts of Interest and Commitment and is capable of advancing critical unmet needs.
Chin was a professor of medicine at Harvard before he joined Lilly in 1999, according to his bio on the company’s Web site. He also got his M.D. from Harvard did a residency in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital and a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism at Mass. General.

Update: Here’s a statement from Chin, which came to us via a Lilly spokeswoman: “At Lilly, I’ve had the privilege of helping to discover medicines that have helped or will help millions of patients. I’ve also had the chance to work with some of the finest people – in science and business – that I have ever known.”