It has been a year since the largest pharmaceutical company in the world acquired San Diego’s CovX, a venture-backed life sciences company developing new treatments for cancer and diabetes.
At the time, Pfizer already had invested more than $522 million to develop a San Diego campus, which has more than 1,000 employees and operates as a major hub for Pfizer Global Research and Development, or PGRD. So it would have been logical for Pfizer to consolidate CovX within its global R&D operations. But it didn’t.
Pfizer instead made CovX part of a new R&D division that includes other biotech units in Boston and the United Kingdom. Pfizer created the division just 14 months ago as an alternative approach to drug discovery, and calls it the Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center, or BBC. I sat down recently with Rodney Lappe, the chief scientific officer at CovX, to discuss how Pfizer’s new model for innovation has been working.
“We remain more or less the way we were when Pfizer bought us,” Lappe says. “The goal is to retain that fast-paced entrepreneurial culture, with the resources of a big pharma company.”
In fact, he says, CovX has grown from 65 employees to 85 since joining the Pfizer fold, with R&D expanding from CovX’s original focus on developing new compounds for cancer and diabetes to new candidates for treating pain and inflammation. Yet Lappe says, “Most of the people here really can’t
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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