Jan. 12–Nearly 2 1/2 years after Guidant Corp. decided it wanted a companywide chief medical and technology officer, it landed one with a high profile.
Dr. Beverly H. Lorell moved last month into her 28th-floor office at Guidant’s headquarters in the Bank One Tower, looking to make her mark by helping bring better cardiology devices to market and find new ways to battle heart disease — the nation’s leading killer.
The corporate post is a first for both Guidant and Lorell, who arrives in Indianapolis from Harvard Medical School in Boston, where she has worked for her 26-year career and will remain as a professor of medicine.
Lorell, 53, who earned her medical degree at Stanford University, is the kind of high-powered academic and physician Guidant hopes can help boost its flagging heart stent business and exploit opportunities in its fast-growing line of heart pacemakers and defibrillators for heart patients. Lorell established and directed the heart failure program at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, one of three Harvard teaching hospitals.
Nationally known for her expertise in heart failure, Lorell “is a thoughtful scholar respected as an investigator, as a researcher, as a clinical cardiologist,” said Dr. Pamela S. Douglas, who worked with Lorell at Harvard and is a professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at University of Wisconsin Medical School.
Lorell has played “a seminal role” in her research and writings on new therapies for heart failure, Douglas said.
Besides Lorell’s work in new products, the Indianapolis medical device maker also wants her to “connect with patients and the press” by speaking out publicly about cardiology innovations and policy needs for the device industry, said company spokesman Steven Tragash.
Guidant began wooing Lorell in the summer of 2001 when Chief Executive Officer Ronald Dollens invited her to lunch. She agreed to meet at a sandwich shop near her hospital in Boston. The bite to eat turned into a three-hour discussion with Dollens, who knew Lorell through their attendance at professional meetings. The wide-ranging conversation over sandwiches led to her decision two years later to join the company, she said. “Guidant is a very interesting company with a lot of energy and a lot of resilience in thinking about new solutions to problems,” she said, sitting last week in her still-bare-walled office. And Dollens, she added, “is very persuasive.”
Dollens declined to talk about the hiring of Lorell.
Lorell’s two-year hesitation in jumping to the corporate world was due, in part, to having to find new doctors for her several thousand heart patients and making sure Guidant was the right fit for her, she said.
Learning on the run
“This is an opportunity for learning a whole lot of new things and having to do it pretty darn quickly,” she said.
Lorell said she wasn’t scared off when Guidant pleaded guilty in June to 10 felony charges for a subsidiary’s cover-up of problems linked to an abdominal aortic graft product.
“It did not make me think twice,” she said of the plea and $92 million fine by the Food and Drug Administration. “Guidant interacted in a very proactive way with the FDA. That was very responsible corporate behavior.”
She said she believes Guidant’s policy on educating employees in regulatory compliance and ethical behavior is better than ones she is familiar with at medical schools.
Lorell said she wants to be part of bringing a new wave of therapies to heart patients. Not enough is known about treating heart failure patients, she said. And better treatments are needed to heal hearts that suffer scarring and other damage from heart attacks and surgery, she said.
With the fast pace of change in cardiology care, “We’re going to be treating patients very differently in 10 years,” she said.
Shore up stent business
As its implantable defibrillator business booms, Guidant is looking to shore up its once market-leading heart stent business, which saw sales plummet this year after the launch of a drug-coated stent by a competitor, Johnson & Johnson. Guidant’s program to develop a drug-coated stent that can be more effective than bare-metal ones is two years behind Johnson & Johnson’s. Stents are tiny metal tubes inserted into the arteries of the heart to hold them open after blockages are removed.
Lorell becomes the first medical doctor on Guidant’s management committee. Up to now, the highest-ranking physician at Guidant were the medical directors of its separate divisions.
Guidant rival Medtronic Inc. has had a corporate medical director role for about 20 years. Boston Scientific Corp. has medical directors assigned to its two main product divisions.
Pioneering woman
Lorell, who grew up in Tucson, Ariz., with a father who taught biology and a mother who was a secretary at a university, decided on a medical career in college and became one of few women at the time in male-dominated cardiology. Only about 20 percent of new cardiologists are women.
She will start a dual-state residency that’s not unusual for top Guidant executives. She is building a house in Zionsville and will keep her Needham, Mass., house with her oncologist husband, John Krikorian, whom she met at medical school. They have two sons. One works for an investment hedge fund; the other is a college student.
Lorell and her husband fly to see each other on weekends, which, given their busy doctoring careers, still gives them about as much time together as before Guidant hired her, she said.
DR. BEVERLY H. LORELL
— Age: 53.
— Position: Vice president and chief medical and technology officer, Guidant Corp., Indianapolis.
— Previous position: director of the heart failure program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston. She remains a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
— Education: Bachelor’s and medical degrees from Stanford University.
— Personal: Married to Dr. John Krikorian. They have two grown sons.
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(c) 2004, The Indianapolis Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
