Dr. Peter Corr thinks the business model that underpinned Big Pharma for years is irrevocably broken.
And he should know. Dr. Corr, a former global research and development chief for Pfizer, witnessed firsthand how big corporations approached product development, which, he says, was not particularly impressive. In fact, it was downright dysfunctional, Dr. Corr says.
“I saw more waste in the system than I ever seen before,” he says.
Dr. Corr, now a general partner for the private equity firm Celtic Therapeutics in New York, spoke to Xconomy last week during a visit to the University of Michigan’s North Campus Research Facility in Ann Arbor, MI.
It was a bit of a homecoming for Dr. Corr: as the top R&D executive for Warner Lambert/Parke Davis, he ran the Ann Arbor facility before Pfizer bought the company in 2000. A few years later, Pfizer closed the center and sold it to the U-M. Dr. Corr has nothing but fond memories of the building. Before Pfizer pulled out, the facility and another one in Sandwich, England were the company’s two most productive sites, he says. (Lipitor, a popular anti-cholesterol drug was invented in Ann Arbor.)
“When I left, it didn’t take them long for them to cut it,” says Dr. Corr, who retired from Pfizer in 2006. “I’m delighted the university took this site. As I remind people, I had nothing to do with [the decision to close it] but wanted to see something happen because I was involved in stimulating this building, which is a sensational building. A lot of money was spent here. Someone ought to take advantage of the fact that this was a world class facility.”
Closing the Ann Arbor facility may not have been Dr. Corr’s idea but it seems to jive with his current thinking about R&D and the drug business.
Innovation, Dr. Corr argues, best happens in smaller groups and often dies in large, top-to-bottom managed corporations.
“Bigger R&D organizations are not as productive per person,” Dr. Corr says. “I think the proof has shown that. Small sites that come together, having very small groups, that’s where innovation comes from. It comes from a few people coming together, getting expertise from where they need to make things happen.”
“That’s how ideas germinate,” he continues. “That’s something, unfortunately, is limited in a large company, when you have overarching committees at every level reviewing it. By the time something comes up to the executives at the top of the company, it has become melded in a variety of ways and that’s not positive for innovation in my view.”
Faced with dwindling sales and shrinking pipelines, Big Pharma over the years grew bigger when they should have shrunk, Dr. Corr says. Pharma executives drove profits mostly through buying rivals and cutting costs instead of developing new products, he says.
“Big Pharma firms will have to break down in smaller segments,” Dr. Corr says. “They got to let the germination of innovation occurs where it occurs: in tiny companies, or even within small groups in large companies. But if you manage the whole thing on a global basis, you destroy innovation.”
“And that’s why a facility like this—where scientists from the U-M, other people in the area, companies
