Celgene CEO: People And Embracing Change Are The Key To Our Success

Robert Hugin, CEO and Chairman of Celgene Corporation CELG, was recently on CNBC to talk about the company’s drug pipeline and Celgene’s success as a company.

“You think about the change of the lives of the myeloma patient today from just 10-12 years ago, it was a death sentence, Hugin said. “Three years, now we are talking about people many, many large majority of the patients dying of other things and other diseases. It’s just dramatic change and that’s what this is all about, it’s producing breakthrough therapies and we are fortunate, we have used that initial success to really broaden our pipeline and now we have got a great exciting future.”

What Is The Secret Of Celgene’s Success As A Company?

“I think, it’s a lot of different factors that lead to success, but good people matter right?,” Hugin replied. “People have to make the judgements of where to invest your money, what decisions to make scientifically and medically, but also I think you have to be forward looking and embrace change. This is a world where the pace of change is accelerating. We think about our company in the last 5 or 6 years, we have totally changed the R&D paradigm.”

He continued, “This whole iterative synergistic relationships of collaborative partnering in areas where we think we have the right technology and sort of just keeping ourselves, we look to find other people that share our vision in the areas that we think we’re going to make dramatic transformational disruptive breakthroughs and partner with them, embrace that.”