MedImmune announced the addition of two new vice presidents Tuesday, going forward with business as usual even as the company comes under fire from shareholders for disappointing sales.
Gaithersburg-based MedImmune, the Washington region’s most successful biotechnology firm by revenue, hired Jamie Harrell to spearhead the marketing strategy for the company’s high-profile Synagis product and Mark Stanton to oversee the marketing for the products in MedImmune’s managed care portfolio.
Harrell previously served as senior director at the biotech firm Centocor in Pennsylvania.
Stanton was a director at Endo Pharmaceuticals, also in Pennsylvania. The appointments come on the heels of several upper management additions in 2006, all of which were intended to energize the commercialization of MedImmune’s product line, including Synagis and FluMist.Earlier this month, MedImmune’s 2006 revenues fell below Wall Street expectations, largely based on disappointing sales of FluMist, which has been plagued by storage problems.
Last Friday, MedImmune rejected a shareholder proposal that it put the company on the auction block. MedImmune responded by saying it would “aggressively implement its business plan” instead of looking for a buyer. MedImmune is often held up as the poster child for biotech success in the Washington region: A publicly traded company, it pulled in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2006. The sale of the firm to an even larger biotech or a pharmaceutical company could endanger its prominent position in the region, Greater Washington Initiative Executive Director Tim Priest said.
“The growth of the number of publicly traded companies is a measure of success for the region … and MedImmune is one of the few publicly traded biotechs in the region,” Priest said. “We would not want to see it acquired. In that scenario we would risk losing the headquarters to another city and over the long-term that could mean a loss in workforce.”
MedImmune employs more than 1,100 people in the area and expects to double that number by 2008.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
