outside of Michigan—can have access to different areas of expertise and drive home their particular product, at least into an early phase of development, get some data that works and then it would be bought by a pharma company.”
I asked Dr. Corr when he realized Big Pharma wasn’t working.
“That’s a real good question,” he answered.
A longtime academic who graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine and taught at Washington University near St. Louis, Dr. Corr eventually joined Monsanto/Searle as senior vice president of discovery research. The company accomplished a lot on a limited budget but lacked scale, he recalls.
Warner Lambert/Parke Davis was a larger company “but decisions were still made fast,” he says.
It was not until 2003, when Dr. Corr was Pfizer’s executive vice president of global research & development and president of worldwide development, that he realized the old model was not sustainable.
The company was spending about $8 billion on R&D but only producing about four products a year, a whopping $2 billion per drug, Dr. Corr says.
“That doesn’t work,” he says. “We needed to go out and license (drug candidates) and keep smaller (R&D) sites and let them go on their own. Let them be funded independently. Let them define how they can work best at their particular site as opposed to manage all of these sites around the world and pretend that we knew what was actually going on.”
Dr. Corr isn’t just pontificating. He practices what he preaches. His private equity firm buys early stage drug candidates with some clinical data, works with outside experts and contract research organizations to further develop the drug, and then auctions off the drug to pharma firms within three to five years.
Nowadays, it might take a single company 12 years to bring a product to market, he says.
The drug industry today is increasingly following this decentralized, outsourcing model, according to Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD).
“The current business climate is challenging pharmaceutical and biotech companies to rethink their approach to outsourcing and how best to build alliances with external service providers as part of a long term drug development strategy,” the center said in report last year.
“The global economic downturn and operating pressures to launch new products faster and more efficiently have increased the need to leverage the benefits of outsourcing,” CSDD Senior Research Fellow Ken Getz said in the report. “But sponsors are rethinking how to best integrate [contract research] partners, given their unique corporate cultures, development and operating philosophies, and legacy processes and systems. That’s why integrated partnerships are being supported through hybrid outsourcing relationship models.”
Dr. Corr says Celtic Therapeutics is currently raising its second fund, which will likely be larger than its first $450 million fund.
