Pharma CEOs plot a new course for R&D

Writers for BusinessWeek recently sat down with a lineup of CEOs from the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies to explore what ails the industry and what they need to do differently. Not surprisingly, the conversation quickly shifted to research and development, where they're failing to make much headway despite investing huge sums in new programs. You can bet that no one is standing still.

James Cornelius (photo [1]) at Bristol-Myers Squibb: "It's troubling in that the Food & Drug Administration is approving 18 to 20 [new drugs a year], but we're spending about $60 billion on research. That equation doesn't work. Something has to give. We'll have to be selective in the R&D bets we make. We're going to see companies working together more to address that R&D productivity issue."

Jeffrey Kindler (photo [2]) at Pfizer: "The expression I use here a lot is: "the spirit of small, the power of scale." I want our business units to be small enough that they can get all the benefits of an entrepreneurial organization. They can do what needs to be done to meet their customers' needs on the one hand, but on the other hand get the benefits where scale does help. Scale helps in late-stage clinical development trials that are very expensive; scale helps commercialization in large markets. If we can get the balance between those two things right, we are going to effectively grow the business."

Severin Schwan (photo [3]) at Roche: "Our philosophy is that people need enough freedom to make decisions in a decentralized manner. One thing we have done in the last 18 months is to further decentralize our management model in pharma by creating five "disease biology areas. DBAs set priorities and make portfolio decisions for their specific diseases. An interesting thing happened when we implemented this new structure: We saw them streamlining certain projects."

- read the article [4] from BusinessWeek

Related Articles:
Biotech R&D - Top 15 R&D Budgets [5]
CEOs share lessons learned in biotech [6]
Crisis forces biotechs to cut R&D, preserve cash [7]
Credit crisis could cripple European drug pipeline [8]
Top 10 mistakes biotechs make (and how to avoid them) [9]
Survey ranks top biotech, biopharma employers [10]