Mark Beck on Life Sciences

One of the company's oldest markets is also one of its highly promising ones. That said, you know we're not talking about television, or LCDs or even fiber optics. More than 60 retirees and guests heard Mark Beck remind his audience that since 1918 when the company was Corning Glass Works it had a new and growing business providing Pyrex brand products to the laboratories of the nation's R&D, health and educational laboratories.

Over the years, the company's health care and laboratory products went from beakers and pipets to pH meters to a range of sophisticated health care and industrial analysis products...even to specially coated plastic containers for growing biological cells. The company's lab products have evolved into today's Life Sciences business Beck leads as senior vice president and general manager.

The target audience for Beck's business is the universe of scientists inventing new medicines and services in the health care field world-wide. As such, Beck said it is a strong cash-flow generator for the company with a market leadership position spanning more than 90 years. Serving the pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets, Life Sciences has manufacturing in the US and Mexico backed by R&D both in Corning and in France. It has more than 5,000 products for more than 100,000 customers.

The latter is a major departure from many of the company's products for automotive, TV or communications each of which have to deal with only a handful of customers. Only 20 per cent of Life Sciences products are sold directly to customers; 80 per cent is sold through distributors. Its customers are the big pharmaceutical companies, biotechnological companies and one that's been around since the beginning -- academia.

Beck described how the current economic climate is impacting those markets and how their reactions are affecting his business. Pharmaceuticals are reacting by mergers with the result that redundancies in product lines are trimmed. Biotech companies that sell services are facing a credit crunch, running out of cash and dealing with insolvency problems. And academia with its reduced government funding and fewer grant programs are freezing hiring and shifting employees from labs to grant-writing to find more financing. "In all this, the result is fewer people in the labs using our products,"Beck said.

Noting that Life Sciences is experiencing a very challenging year, the business remains focused on its objectives has increased its profit even in the face of declining sales. The silver lining in the global situation, he noted, is that the increasing number of seniors -- the percentage of people over 65 is growing dramatically -- is good for the future of his business. "Health care spending increases with age," he said.

On the other hand, he noted that drug industry discoveries are not keeping pace with research and development advances. The result is a paradox: Drug companies spend more in R&D, but new drug introductions are declining. "Ninety-two per cent of the drugs that make it to the clinical trial stage fail and 75 per cent of those that become successful do so for treating something other than what it was originally developed for," he said. As an example, he cited the scientist working on a drug for hypertension noted a side effect was hair growth on his arm. The drug wound up being marketed as Rogaine.

Beck said the drug development process can take 12 or more years and cost as much as $1 billion.. The drug industry needs to decrease that time frame, cut cost and improve the probability of profitable success. They do that by outsourcing or collaborating on research, through emphasizing physiologically relevant drug discovery efforts and pursuing cell based regenerative medicine.

A key component in all that, Beck said, is the company's Epic system, a high through-put label-free technology to directly detect biomolecular reactions with non-engineered cells. The bottom line with that description is that the Epic system can greatly speed up the discovery process with respect to a developing drug's impact on target disease cells. Beck said 26 Epic systems have been sold in North America, Europe and Japan. And while each Epic system is a "high ticket" item with respect to its initial cost, the real beauty of the system for the company's bottom line is that each unit is a consumer of large numbers of the company's patented micro cells...the "blades" to the Epic system "razor."

Said Beck, with Epic and our other products, Life Sciences is at the heart of the world's leading-edge drug discovery stories. "Our cell-based regenerative medicine efforts are targeted at the three biggest health care areas: cardiac care, diabetes and Alzheimers.

John O'Hare on Retiree Extras & More

After Mark Beck's presentation, John O'Hare of Corporate Communications took the podium to describe and demonstrate the Retiree Extras purchasing program now posted on the CIRG web site and to introduce the Sharp Retiree Discount offering that was added in the past few weeks.

At the outset, O'Hare stressed that Corning Incorporated's involvement in these offers is only as as broker in providing the platform by which retirees can access these money-saving opportunities. By clicking on the Retiree Extras or the Sharp call out box on the site, users are linked to the appropriate site where they can browse -- "window shop" -- a broad range of products and services.

While these sites enable goods or services to be purchased on line, they also serve as vehicles for being smarter shoppers when users go to their preferred merchants to see if they can do better.

That the company's Corning Perks program (for active employees) has proven popular attests to the service's value. "Employees have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on everything from automobiles to iPods since the first program was introduced in 2006. It really does pay to shop and compare," O'Hare said.

If you haven't tried this shopping service, you probably should. It's easy to do.

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