Leonard Blum: The man who will take on Viagra

Millions of men will no longer have to hurry up to have sex after taking a pill if Leonard Blum is successful at his job.

Blum is in charge of sales and marketing at Icos, the Bothell biotech company that created Cialis, the impotence drug just approved in Europe as the first direct competitor to Pfizer's Viagra.

To compete, Blum has to cross a few things off his to-do list: A. Recruit sales reps to talk doctors into prescribing a longer-lasting impotence pill than Viagra; B. Turn Cialis into a household name; and C. Outmaneuver one of the pharmaceutical industry's savviest marketing forces, Pfizer.

Blum paces the dining room in his Seattle home, ticking off research findings showing men want a longer-lasting drug. Studies show Cialis can remain in the bloodstream up to 36 hours; Viagra has been shown to last four hours.

"With Viagra, a man takes the medicine, he has an erection, he has sex," Blum said. "It's functional, and for a lot of men it isn't really satisfying. What men want is to be normal again. They want to be able to respond to their partner when the time is right. They want to separate the medicine from the act of intimacy."

A lot is riding on Blum's ability to hit the right chord. The Cialis vs. Viagra battle could turn Icos from a biotech research-and-development company in Bothell into a pharmaceutical company with a potential billion-dollar moneymaker.

In mid-November, after years of clinical trials in more than 4,000 men, Cialis was cleared for sale in Europe. It may get approval for U.S. sales as early as the second half of 2003.

Research shows about 70 million men in North America and Europe have impotence, and about 80 percent have never been treated. Blum has been preparing for this tilt since June 2000 when he came to Icos from Merck, where he spent 13 years in sales, marketing and management.

Co-workers and relatives describe him as focused, analytical and gifted at articulating science in understandable terms. His background has a string of achievements: Eagle Scout, magna cum laude graduate in economics from Princeton, a Stanford MBA, top of his class as an Army Green Beret.

At Merck, he led sales-and-marketing teams in the United States, Switzerland, Germany and Israel, guiding the launch of 11 new drugs.

Blum, who turns 42 in January, is married with three children 10 months through 6 years. He gives a blank look when asked about his hobbies. His wife, Missy, said he enjoys picking stocks, and closely follows Middle East affairs.

In his office, Blum has a picture of himself with Paul Newman, who has a relationship with Lilly to raise awareness of impotence. There's another of Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister whom he met during his time at Merck.

Blum comes across serious, but with a sense of humor. One vice: He makes daily lunch runs to McDonald's, and regularly orders pizza at the office to get through 17-hour days.

"When I was in Munich, Zurich and Tel Aviv there were certain spikes in sales they probably couldn't explain at McDonald's. Now I can clear up the mystery," Blum said with a laugh.

Ken Ferguson, senior director of therapeutic development at Icos, said Blum's drive is infectious enough to persuade scientists — who tend to be distrustful of marketers — to believe they can take on Pfizer.

Ferguson told the story of how Blum once was talking about work on a cellphone on his way to the airport, while checking bags, through weapons screening, and onto the plane, talking until being forced to turn the phone off.

"Leonard is one of the most intense people at Icos, and we have a lot of intense people," Ferguson said.

Blum's co-workers say he'll need the drive. Pfizer sold $1.5 billion worth of Viagra last year, and it has a string of billion-dollar hits including Lipitor and Zoloft. It is the world's largest drug company.

Icos, by comparison, is young and tiny. It has fewer than 500 employees, and no approved drugs in the United States. A partnership with Eli Lilly splits decision-making and profits on Cialis 50/50, while allowing Icos to tap into a worldwide marketing and distribution network. Lilly's sales and marketing group is not on a roll; its Prozac sales fell unusually fast when it went off patent last year, and sales for its sepsis drug Xigris have been slow.

Blum shrugs it off, saying Lilly isn't as arrogant as some pharmaceutical companies and has been able to fend off Pfizer in the schizophrenia-drug market. Still, he's not relying entirely on the big partner — Icos has hired 20 sales managers of its own. He intends to hire an additional 165 sales reps when the drug is launched in the United States, aiming to pluck away top performers at other companies who want to make a bigger impact.

Blum grew up in western North Carolina, in Asheville, a small city along the Blue Ridge Mountains. His father, who he says was his hero, was born in Czechoslovakia, a Jew who survived Nazi concentration camps before immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Blum's father supported his family with a textiles business, but didn't encourage his sons to follow him because of looming foreign competition. Blum and his brothers grew up close and academically competitive. Leonard's older brother Andrew is now an interventional radiologist in Chicago; his younger brother Robert is a senior vice president at a Bay Area biotech company.

Robert Blum remembers his brother as goal-oriented, reading "War and Peace" in middle school to the end. Robert said he and his brothers were shaped by their father's experience as a Holocaust survivor, but Leonard in particular. He said he believes Leonard joined the military partly to repay a debt for liberating their father.

The Army Special Forces training tested his mental and physical limits, Leonard says. The limited sleep, limited food, and running miles carrying heavy packs instilled the need to never quit and to be dependable. He joined Merck after it recruited him out of Special Forces school.

Leonard said he got into pharmaceuticals partly out of idealism. He gets irritated by jokes about how the last thing the world needs is more sex-crazed middle-aged men, and more drug companies profiteering on the world's ills.

He makes an earnest-sounding counter-argument about relationships falling apart because of impotence. He says he could have sold soda or snacks, but chose pharmaceuticals to help people live longer and better. He points out Cialis could fuel Icos' research in lethal diseases such as severe sepsis and pulmonary hypertension.

"If 25 years from now we have a company here that in its contribution to medicine and patients stands alongside a Merck or a Pfizer, then absolutely everything here will have been worthwhile," he said.

Luke Timmerman: 206-515-5644 or ltimmerman@seattletimes.com.