at Pfizer when we spoke by phone last Friday. He has as good a perspective anybody, since his company is attempting some innovative work on microRNA drugs in collaboration with a couple of pharma giants—GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi.
Regulus is still a small company, with 52 employees, seeking to grow to 60 by year’s end, Xanothopoulos says. The company clearly needs quite a bit of brainpower and financial horsepower for such a complex and demanding task, but after seeing what happens at so many big companies, he’s thinking carefully about how to grow the right way. Bigger certainly isn’t better when it comes to R&D productivity, and it might actually be counter-productive, based partly on some crunching Xanthopoulos says he did of Ernst & Young data on R&D budgets and drug approvals back in 2007.
“Clearly, you can’t industrialize innovation,” Xanthopoulos says. “You can’t do a linear increase of annual R&D spending, or throw a larger and larger number of bodies at a problem and expect to see higher productivity and better outcomes. It simply doesn’t work.”
The really big problem Xanthopoulos says he saw in the Pfizer story was one of constantly shifting gears to meet short-term financial goals. Life sciences experiments, by their very nature, take months and sometimes years to generate meaningful answers. It isn’t like a software version 2.0 that can be cranked out in a matter of months, or a couple of years. You can’t just say cancer drugs are hot one year and cold the next, and expect to get anywhere.
“Somebody with a bold vision would have to say ‘Here’s what we’re going to do, and we won’t deviate from it. We need five years or more for this to work out,” Xanothopoulos says. But that’s almost impossible, he adds, given the short-term earnings pressures, and short average tenures of Fortune 500 CEOs. “They don’t care or don’t have the time to care,” he says.
Regulus has its own belief, which says that the ideal R&D team should have about 60 to 80 members, capable of running six to eight projects simultaneously, with the support of 10 to 15 people in administration, and a network of outside contractors, Xanthopoulos says. It’s based partly on his own analysis of drug R&D productivity, but also on the concept from ancient Rome, in which small teams of centurions were effective in battle. If a team is smaller, it doesn’t quite have the resources needed to develop a new drug. Anything much bigger would be too unwieldy, he says.
Big Pharma, given that it’s already big, would be wise to follow this model, essentially having lots of lots of small, highly autonomous teams that operate with a light touch of coordination from headquarters, Xanthopoulos says.
I can imagine a system like that working at Pfizer, or any of the Big Pharma companies.
The latest headline out of Pfizer offers some support for this idea. Pfizer won FDA approval on Friday for crizotinib (Xalkori) for certain forms of lung cancer. By all accounts, this is an outstanding new advancement for cancer patients. On a recent trip to Pfizer’s La Jolla, CA research center, I met Jean Cui, one of the low-level medicinal chemists who did some of the critical early work on crizotinib. She started work on this project at a small team more than a decade ago at a little Bay Area biotech company called Sugen, which got swallowed up by Pharmacia in a merger, which was later swallowed up by Pfizer. Through all the various portfolio reviews and internal reorganizations, she fought for this program. She and the rest of her team stuck it out long enough to get a bit lucky, as researchers realized that this molecule was likely going to much more effective than originally thought.
It’s a story of clever science, perseverance, and a bit of luck. It all happened far away from Pfizer headquarters, and way, way below Jeff Kindler’s pay grade. The challenge for the next generation of Big Pharma leaders will be to build small, talented teams with people like Cui, give them the resources and time they need, plus some clear and ambitious goals, and get out the way.
