Cuts at AstraZeneca
03/02/12 18:28 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Fri, 02/03/2012 - 18:28.
AstraZeneca's announcement of major reductions in its workforce in Europe and North America is symptomatic of recent trends with several other major pharmaceutical companies. It is likely that many of these jobs will ultimately be re-directed to emerging opportunities in Asia. However, the stated plan of AstraZeneca is to forge virtual alliances with small biotech and university-based researchers to help fill its drug pipeline.
A relatively small portion of the new drugs approved by the US FDA in the last 15 years have actually arisen from academic institutions. A recent review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n11/abs/nrd3251.html) determined that about 58% and 18%, respectively, of new pharmaceuticals on the market were originally developed in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Of the remaining 24% of drug candidates arising from universities, two-thirds required further development by biotech companies before they were picked up by big pharma.
Increasing the dependence on universities to discover and develop new drugs is likely to further exacerbate the relatively poor performance of the pharmaceutical industry to produce more and better therapeutics. In Canada, and I suspect elsewhere, universities have seen this opportunity as a means to encourage government to provide even more funding to them with the promise to be more translational in their research. The Centre for Drug Research and Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is one example of such an effort. However, having been involved in drug discovery and development at UBC and in small biotech companies in the Vancouver area for more than 20 years, I have a lot of trepidation about whether such initiatives will ultimately be successfully.
In my opinion, the transformation of university laboratories and facilities into pseudo-biotechnology companies is ill conceived. Drug discovery is a very risky and very capital intensive business that requires a high level of expertise. Life science departments in universities have a strong basic research focus, and this is very appropriate as centers of learning and innovation. However, the more routine and disciplined nature of drug discovery and development does not support an appropriate training environment for undergraduate and graduate students. In the short term with the massive layoffs in the pharmaceutical industry, there may well be opportunities for universities to recruit highly experienced individuals from big pharma to manage academic drug discovery enterprises. But what is the point of using them to train more people for an industry that is already migrating from North America and Europe to other jurisdictions?
If governments truly wish to foster the growth of life science-based industries, it would be more prudent to increase their direct support for training and R&D in companies and encourage more academic-industrial partnerships. In Canada, there have been many successful government programs (such as the National Research Council-Industrial Assistance Program and the Scientific Research and Economic Development Program) in place to facilitate this. However, this support has been steadily eroding and recent announcements from the Canadian government are very worrisome in this respect.
Link to the original blog post.
AstraZeneca's announcement of major reductions in its workforce in Europe and North America is symptomatic of recent trends with several other major pharmaceutical companies. It is likely that many of these jobs will ultimately be re-directed to emerging opportunities in Asia. However, the stated plan of AstraZeneca is to forge virtual alliances with small biotech and university-based researchers to help fill its drug pipeline.
A relatively small portion of the new drugs approved by the US FDA in the last 15 years have actually arisen from academic institutions. A recent review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n11/abs/nrd3251.html) determined that about 58% and 18%, respectively, of new pharmaceuticals on the market were originally developed in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Of the remaining 24% of drug candidates arising from universities, two-thirds required further development by biotech companies before they were picked up by big pharma.
Increasing the dependence on universities to discover and develop new drugs is likely to further exacerbate the relatively poor performance of the pharmaceutical industry to produce more and better therapeutics. In Canada, and I suspect elsewhere, universities have seen this opportunity as a means to encourage government to provide even more funding to them with the promise to be more translational in their research. The Centre for Drug Research and Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is one example of such an effort. However, having been involved in drug discovery and development at UBC and in small biotech companies in the Vancouver area for more than 20 years, I have a lot of trepidation about whether such initiatives will ultimately be successfully.
In my opinion, the transformation of university laboratories and facilities into pseudo-biotechnology companies is ill conceived. Drug discovery is a very risky and very capital intensive business that requires a high level of expertise. Life science departments in universities have a strong basic research focus, and this is very appropriate as centers of learning and innovation. However, the more routine and disciplined nature of drug discovery and development does not support an appropriate training environment for undergraduate and graduate students. In the short term with the massive layoffs in the pharmaceutical industry, there may well be opportunities for universities to recruit highly experienced individuals from big pharma to manage academic drug discovery enterprises. But what is the point of using them to train more people for an industry that is already migrating from North America and Europe to other jurisdictions?
If governments truly wish to foster the growth of life science-based industries, it would be more prudent to increase their direct support for training and R&D in companies and encourage more academic-industrial partnerships. In Canada, there have been many successful government programs (such as the National Research Council-Industrial Assistance Program and the Scientific Research and Economic Development Program) in place to facilitate this. However, this support has been steadily eroding and recent announcements from the Canadian government are very worrisome in this respect.
Link to the original blog post.