Pfiz­er CEO Read hands off drug de­vel­op­ment re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to his hand picked suc­ces­sor

Un­der Ian Read, Pfiz­er $PFE be­came the Big Phar­ma will­ing to buy any­thing, in­clud­ing an­oth­er Big Phar­ma, and pay just about any price to keep the com­pa­ny grow­ing. Every word he speaks about M&A is parsed for some in­di­ca­tion of when and what he’ll bring the check book out for next.

So you can imag­ine that hand pick­ing a po­ten­tial suc­ces­sor is get­ting some care­ful scruti­ny to­day.

Pfiz­er has pro­mot­ed Pfiz­er’s In­no­v­a­tive Health chief Al­bert Bourla to the new role of chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer, where he’s been giv­en a spe­cial man­date to over­see the day-to-day ac­tiv­i­ty around prod­uct de­vel­op­ment, sales and strat­e­gy. As the Wall Street Jour­nal notes, that puts him in a po­si­tion of con­sid­er­able in­flu­ence in shap­ing Pfiz­er’s late-stage pipeline as the com­pa­ny lines up its best shots at ma­jor new com­mer­cial prod­ucts.

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