Roche

State of the Biomedical Research–Not So Good for Pharma R&D

Exerpt from From Science News

Pfizer’s R&D budget, $9.3 billion in 2010, will drop to less than $8.5 billion this year and to between $6.5 billion and $7 billion in 2012, and the company will stop funding research in internal medicine, allergy and respiratory diseases, urology, and tissue repair.

In fact, the pharmaceutical industry as a whole faces financial pressures, as companies are producing fewer new drugs than in the past. In these conditions, even highly promising research has gotten the ax; in November, Roche cut its RNA interference research unit after spending $400 million over 3 years.

Drug companies also seem less wary nowadays about outsourcing. Among other examples, Eli Lilly began outsourcing animal toxicology studies in 2008, and Wyeth (purchased by Pfizer in 2009) began out sourcing data management for its clinical trials in 2003. In 2007, AstraZeneca even decided to move the production of many active pharmaceutical ingredients—perhaps the core activity of a drug company—to China.

These downsizing events are not particularly caused by still depressed economy, they have more to do with industry-specific patent expiration and productivity issues with large pharmas. What does it all mean to current graduate students and postdocs? Perhaps an even tighter job market than now for starting researchers for some years to come until the next round of sea change comes around. Be aware of what’s going on in smaller, more productive, and focused biotech companies.

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Thursday, February 10th, 2011 State of Research No Comments

Introducing Product-on-Demand Biological Research Reagents

The general order of operations in the bioreagent industry begins with a developer observing or forecasting a need and developing a product. The supplier then supplies that product to customers by showing that the product will suit their existing needs. An alternative order in our industry is after a new discovery in the form an enzyme reaction mechanism, affinity binding, or biological system is made in lab, someone realizes that discovery could be made into a product. If the idea is picked up by a commercial R&D team, the underlining mechanisms of the discovery are then exploited for particular use and reagents or kits will be built around it. The new products are introduced to the market by convincing potential users that they will make their research better, cheaper, or faster.

From a supplier’s point of view, if the current processes for developing new products have been working, what’s the incentive to change? From a researcher’s point of view, well, do they have any other choices? If something is not commercially available, someone will just make it in the lab if they need it. Some of us still remember the days when a graduate student needed to make his own restriction enzyme because NEB didn’t sell it. However, there is a disconnect between how much new knowledge is being gained every single day in tens of thousands of labs and how small a portion of that knowledge pool is being turned into more powerful tools to make the next round of research easier and more cost-effective. For instance, when an important gene’s promoter is recently defined by a functional study in 293T cells, how soon do you expect to test the signals that influence transcription from that promoter in the primary cells you are working on? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply buy a vector that will express a promoter-driven reporter ready to be introduced into the primary cells in your lab instead of having a graduate student design, construct, learn and try to make a lentiviral vector in the next few months?

And yes, there is the route called custom projects provided by a few bioreagent companies. The prices are often inhibiting for the reasons that the price needs to cover for labor on industry pay scale, materials, indirect, and profit. Additionally, since the service provider does not take ownership of the product, the work of researching the relevant pathways and making construct designs is left to the user.

There is a better way. A company can plan product groups, lines, and packages based solely on the demonstrated importance of a system such as signal pathway or a family of molecules like miRNA. The plan can project to use the most advanced technologies, even accompanied with full product descriptions and vector maps. However, it would be a great waste of money and material if nobody would ever need it, right? One way of dealing with the initial cost is that we make the first kit upon the first order. The customer that places the first order of a new product will get a deep discount off the shelf-product price on what used to be a custom project. They might even have the opportunity to provide input on the product design prior to production. From a supplier side, we will benefit by having an opportunity to initiate a new product without major investment, which in turn would keep our overall prices low for such innovative and advanced products.

This model should help speed up the commercial application of any new biological findings, lower the cost and price of bioreagent products, and encourage interaction between researchers who normally do not work with each other to produce better products for increasing the efficiency of research.

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Friday, June 4th, 2010 Customer Feedback, You have the power No Comments