Andrew Jack, for tonight's Financial Times online, offers a very thought-provoking set of opinions (collected last month at a meeting of The Athenaeum Group), on pharmaceutical R&D practices -- and the rising wave of consolidation in multi-national pharma concerns. Do go read it all, but here's a tantalizing snippet:
. . . .Kenneth Kaitlin, director of the Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Development. . . says: “The industry has been talking about the issue for many years, but there were never the drivers that there are now. I don’t think it has ever had so much at stake. There are companies that are not going to survive.”
He cites as symptomatic the large-scale takeovers this year of Wyeth by Pfizer and Schering-Plough by Merck, which he argues were primarily designed to defer patent expiries and cut costs rather than provide a solution to falling research productivity. . . .
Companies are also seeking to create structures that foster innovation. Chris Viehbacher, who has been overhauling Sanofi-Aventis since he became chief executive late last year, says: “We had 11 management levels in research and development and you had to dig down quite a few before you found anyone doing research. We need to reconfigure. We’ve just been tweaking things. We have to change how people think and interact”. . . .
[Ed. Note: graphic of possible "partnering"/bust-up of Consumer Health at Schering-Plough, post close, per Merck CEO Dick Clark's July 2009 remarks.]
