Aventis Leaders (left to right) Gerald Belle, Richard Markham, and Thierry Soursac meet on a rare day when all three are at the company's North American headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey.

Trying to keep pace with news about Aventis is like trying to bail water out of a canoe with a teaspoon. In December alone, during the time of year when most corporate offices look like ghost towns except for the blinking lights of Christmas trees, the company submitted four new drug applications (NDAs), announced a major oncology research collaboration deal, revealed positive clinical trial results supporting a new indication for its flagship brand, and sold two business units to the tune of nearly $1 billion. So although fourth quarter financial results weren't available at press time, 2003 appears to have been a banner year for Aventis, a merged company that was barely a year old the last time it was profiled in the pages of Pharmaceutical Executive, in December 2000.

Three years later, conversations with COO Richard Markham, head of global commercial operations Thierry Soursac, and Gerald "Jerry" Belle, president of North America pharmaceuticals, confirms that most of the company's goals are not very different from those of its Big Pharma competitors. What sets Aventis apart is how many of its promises it has already delivered on. Here are three:

BioFact>> Gerald "Jerry" Belle has been with Aventis and its parent companies since 1969, when he worked for Merrell-National Laboratories as a marketing research analyst. The only break in his Aventis career came when he served as a US Army artillery officer between January 1970 and October 1971.

International Integration The evening before meeting with Pharmaceutical Executive, Richard Markham threw a congratulatory party for 50 employees involved in the completion of a recent licensing deal. "I was struck by the fact that I was looking at them and there was no way you could ever walk into this room and have any idea who was former Hoechst and who was former RPR," he says. "We're all wearing the same uniform now. I know of other mergers that happened more than 10 years ago where people still say, 'Well, he's a company X person,' or 'She's a company Y person.' You don't hear that here, ever."

Markham says the predecessor companies that formed Aventis-the numerous multinational parent companies of HMR and RPR-already had so much experience with "cross-national culture issues" that they were accustomed to the complexities of working with people in different time zones and from varied cultures. "On top of that," he explains, "we purposefully chose people for management positions who were comfortable working in that kind of environment, used to working with people that might be from different upbringings, went to schools in a different country, or had different customs." But the most unusual, and apparently successful, thing that Aventis did was execute a deliberate, structured integration program for the new company's top 500 employees, 40 or 50 at a time. "It gave people a chance to ask questions and complain if they wanted to, and try to understand why things were the way they were," Markham says.

At-a-Glance: Aventis

Preferred Partner Aventis' unusual infrastructure enhanced its visibility with other global companies, and, in 2001, earned it the title of the largest pharma company in both France and Germany. It also offered the ideal platform to promote the company as a desirable partner for both R&D and commercialization. To date, Aventis has maintained successful alliances with more than 300 pharma and biotech companies and academic institutions-Procter & Gamble, Merck, and Pfizer, to name a few-in numerous therapeutic categories. Belle says it's their open-minded philosophy and humble perspective that keeps them competitive and brings them closer to achieving "preferred partner status" in the global arena.

"We are certainly a discovery house for innovative pharmaceuticals, and we intend to develop and commercialize those successfully for medical needs," says Belle. "But we know that we can't be all things to all people. We can't do it all ourselves." Belle reports that Frank Douglas, executive vice-president of DI&A, has said on several occasions, in front of analysts and others, "No one organization is smart enough to contain all relevant knowledge, therefore a key to a successful R&D program is to embrace ideas that come from the outside and also to collaborate."

Regeneron CEO Len Schleiffer asked: "What partner has the experience and 'stick-to-it-iveness' to enter what was going to be a very tough and important contest?" Aventis was the answer..

Judah Folkman, MD, of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, widely acknowledged as the father of anti-angiogenesis research, gave the research a big thumbs up. "Regeneron is to be congratulated for the development of VEGF-Trap and for starting it in clinical trials for cancer patients," he says. "I look forward to its continuing success. VEGF-Trap and drugs like it give hope that someday it may be possible to reduce the harsh side effects of current cancer therapy and to decrease the risk of drug resistance. If these goals can be achieved, then the day may come when cancer can be converted to a chronic, manageable disease like diabetes or heart disease."

"[VEGF-Trap] is a technology that is far better than anything we would have done on our own," says Belle. "We're not going to spend the time on it. We think we're the best horse in the race so let's go get it." And "get it" they did, but not for the most typical or obvious reasons.

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