The Future For Major Pharma Companies: Distribution, Not Discovery?

The way in which major pharmaceutical companies will be able, in thefuture, to sustain innovation and competitiveness given the prohibitively high costs of drug discovery, has once again been on the agenda at the Economist Conference "Preparing For The New Millennium" held in London last month.

The challenges thrown up by globalization, increasing consumer power coupled with the need to improve efficiency, growing product development complexity, new technologies and prohibitive costs require "a total reconfiguration of the industry," according to Jurgen Drews, president of global pharmaceuticals research at Hoffmann-La Roche. Speaking at the conference, Prof Drews said that the pharmaceutical industry has had difficulty in dealing with the complexities of drug discovery brought about by the advent of genomic sciences, as the emphasis has shifted onto medicine becoming more diagnostic and preventative.

Pharma "Dependent" On Bio More significantly, Prof Drews said that the top 10-20 companies themselves were clearly not providing enough specific compounds, and noted that "virtually all scientific breakthroughs in terms of drug discovery have come from outside the pharmaceutical industry," ie universities and biotechnology companies. Furthermore, he claimed that the major drug firms are "critically dependent on the biotech industry for new technologies."