Times are good at Eli Lilly. Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for weight-loss drug stocks looks set to turn the company into the world’s first $US1 trillion drugmaker by market value.
But war stories about gloomier times are never far away when you run a pharmaceutical company. In the late 2000s, Eli Lilly’s share price neared all-time lows as patents of its blockbuster psychiatric drugs – chief among them Prozac, Zyprexa and Cymbalta – expired.
