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Millennium: The Risks of Forward Integration

Millennium Pharmaceuticals has been spending much of the new century building a development organization. Much of this nuts-and-bolts endeavor came out of its acquisition of Cor Therapeutics in 2001, a transforming transaction that has delivered only mixed results, and has now put the company on a hard-to-steer and equally hard-to-alter course.

Mark Levin, CEO of Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. , has always wanted to play with the big guys in pharma. If the heads of other companies use the line "We intend to build a leading integrated biopharmaceutical company" as boilerplate, Levin operates his firm in that grand manner. The Millennium-sized deal became a hallmark of the 1990s, during the company's first seven years in existence.

But that was in the millennium past. The firm has been spending much of the new century building a development organization, and responding to a very different set of challenges....

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