Case: Eli Lily Cymbalta

Case: Eli Lily Cymbalta

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Executive Summary

Prozac the leading brand of anti – depression medication is set to expire in the next few months. Lily's the current manufacturer thought to introduce another product into the market that would replace Prozac after its expiration.

NAT was formed by 2 colleagues at Lily – Mark Demitrack and Brett Schmidli, and later asked two other members Jim Lancaster and John Kaiser to join them based on the professional experience. The mission of the team was to find and develop a drug that would later replace Prozac. After a series of analysis and testing, Cymbalta was chosen by the team to replace Prozac.

Kaiser who is the Marketing Director of the company was asked to give a presentation on a topic developing a successor to the now legendary anti depressant Prozac which later on Kaiser sub titled ‘no pain no gain".

He gave an overview of what depression is and analyzed the effectiveness of Cymbalta comparing it basically to the leading brand Prozac. After the presentation some challenges and concerns were raised by some of the committee members which they think may affect their goal for Cymbalta which is replacing the leading brand.

Suggestions and recommendations later were made for the team members based on the challenges identified.

An Overview on Depression

Depression, as a disease, characterized by a sustained emotional disturbance that interferes with daily activities such as the ability to work, study, sleep or eat for a period of time as short as two weeks or as long as five years or more. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, depression is a chronic condition second only in prevalence to hypertension (high blood pressure) in general medical practice. Studies in scientific publications have estimated that depression affects anywhere from 10% to 25% of the population at some point in their life time, with women twice as likely as men to suffer an episode of depression. Despite the prevalence of depression many with those symptoms do not seek medical help. Depression often goes undiagnosed because of its complicated set of symptoms, which tend to vary overtime and overlap with the symptoms. As a consequence of those symptoms of depression, it has been estimated that less than 50% actually receive treatment.

The broad and complex set of symptoms for depression is often described in four general categories: mood changes, cognitive changes, behavior changes and physical changes. Changes in mood include sadness, feelings of helplessness, anxiety, or thoughts of death or suicide. Cognitive changes include the loss of concentration, increase forgetfulness, and the inability to make decisions. Behavior