Drug Companies Changing to Stay Competitive
Whether or not the world’s major drug companies know the name Henry Chesbrough or know of his grim assessment of the future of drug development, they seem to be responding and changing the way they do R&D.
Facing looming patent expirations, Pfizer, is establishing a new network of academic centers designed to refill Pfizer’s pipeline with company-academic teams that will work side-by-side to speed drug discovery efforts. The first two centers are U.S. based and Pfizer has plans to expand to Europe and Asia next year.
AstraZeneca has taken a different approach, with a massive restructuring of their R&D organization last year. Thousands were laid off and several campuses closed. More than half of the company’s new R&D leaders are from outside the organization; brought in to add fresh new ideas. Part of the plan is for up to 40 percent of AstraZeneca’s pipeline to come from external sources by 2014. The company will accomplish this through methods such as licensing patents, acquiring smaller companies and collaborating with research partners.
“In parts of our R&D we saw radical ideas squashed too quickly,” said John Hennessy, executive director, AstraZeneca R&D Boston.
Elias Zerhouni, head of R&D at French drug maker Sanofi says the company’s the company’s current goal is to focus on first understanding a disease and then figuring out what tools might be effective in treating it, rather than identifying a potential tool first and then looking for a disease area in which it could be helpful. Although open to new ideas from external sources like universities and hospitals, last year the company cut the number of projects in its portfolio by about half, so it could focus on those that have the greatest potential to meet medical objectives, commercial return and are clinically feasible.
Even the National Institute of Health of the U.S. government is trying to contribute, with the proposal of a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), envisioned as a driver for NIH efforts to push promising discoveries further down the drug discovery pipeline.
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