John Stanford
speaker
1,479 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
John Stanford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Because back in the mid-2000s, Big Pharma had a problem.
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Patents were expiring, pipelines were thinning out, and the old playbook of buy a competitor and cut costs and call it growth wasn't actually producing new medicines.
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Bristol Meyer Squibb decided to try something different, and that's where today's guest, Dr.
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Jeremy Levin, comes in and makes history himself.
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Instead of one giant swing, doctor Levin and his colleagues proposed they go small and deliberate, sell off the businesses that didn't fit, nutritionals, medical devices, and use that capital to buy up promising early stage science one piece at a time.
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Dr.
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Levin gave it a name, String of Pearls.
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Each acquisition was a pearl.
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String enough of them together and you've got something valuable, without betting the whole company on a single roll of the dice.
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The strategy found its defining moment in 2009 when BMS acquired a company called Metarex for roughly $2.3 billion.
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Dr.
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Levin will talk about this in the episode.
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Metarex didn't look like much on paper.
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Small biotech with early cancer research, but buried in that research were the foundations of what we become Urvoi and Optivo.
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Two drugs that didn't just make money, they created an entire new category of cancer treatment, immuno oncology.
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Op Devo alone still accounts for over a fifth of BMS's revenue today.
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That's the part that made String of Pearls famous.
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Not just that it worked, but that nobody saw it coming from the outside.
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The industry took notice.
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In 2012, pharmaceutical giant Teva went out and hired Dr.
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Showing 21–40 of 1,479 · page 2 of 74
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