So says Matthew Herper in Forbes, and I’m certainly not going to argue with him. His point is what he calls lack of appreciation for the human capital in drug discovery:
An ideal drug company would follow all sorts of crazy ideas in early research, with the goal of selecting those where there was a high probability of believing they would actually prove effective in clinical development. It would bulk up on scientists, and try to limit the number of large clinical trials it conducted to those where some kind of test — blood levels of some protein, perhaps — led researchers to think they had a high probability of success. (Novartis, the most successful company in terms of getting new drugs to market, has moved in this direction.) But the tendency of the shutdowns has been to shut laboratories, too. Look at Merck’s stance toward the old Organon labs or Pfizer’s decision to shut the Michigan labs where Lipitor was invented. Taking the ax to the scientists is probably a mistake.
There’s always been a disconnect between the business end and the scientific end, but the stresses of the last few years have opened it up wider than ever. The business of making money from drug discovery has never been trickier (or more expensive), and the scientists themselves have never felt more threatened. I can see it in the comments here on this site, whenever the topic of layoffs or top-management incompetence comes up. There are a lot of hard feelings out there – and, really, given the way things have been going, why wouldn’t there be?
But at the risk of collecting some thrown bricks myself, I see where the business people are coming from. Our current cost structures are unsustainable. And although I don’t agree with the solution of laying everyone off, I don’t know what I would do instead. For many companies, it would have been better to have started adjusting years ago, although there’s hindsight bias to keep in mind when you think that way. Many companies did try to start adjusting years ago, only to be overwhelmed by even worse than they’d counted on. Then there are a few organizations that just look unfixable by any means anyone can think up.
But I think it’s safe to say that relations between the two lobes of the drug R&D; enterprise, the financial one and the scientific one, have probably never been worse. It’s nothing that some success and hiring couldn’t fix, but those are thin on the ground these days.