GlaxoSmithKline has made the wild and crazy decision to let its scientists decide which drugs are most promising and thus deserving of funding. From Bureaucracy Buster? Glaxo Lets Scientists Choose Its New Drugs:
Glaxo, the world’s second-largest drug company after Pfizer, based on sales, was created from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2000. Chief Executive Jean-Pierre Garnier acknowledges that both companies were stumbling in their core business of developing drugs at the time of the merger. And while the merger created a formidable sales and marketing operation, it threatened to burden research with even more bureaucracy at a time when shareholders were pressing for new drugs to replace those losing patent protection.Of particular concern was the middle stage of drug development. About 80% of potential drugs fail when scientists try to fine-tune rough chemical compounds and turn them into promising medicines ready for large-scale human tests. It’s at this stage that researchers make some of the toughest calls, deciding which products to advance and testing them on animals and small groups of humans for toxicity and early signs of efficacy.
Glaxo used to handle the middle stage like a conveyor belt: Scientists would conduct their specific experiments and then pass the compound on to other scientists for the next step. If any individual step hit a snag, a drug’s development could languish.
Mr. Garnier and Tachi Yamada, Glaxo’s head of research and development, decided to try a different approach to the problem: giving scientists a vested interest in a single drug’s success. To do this, they split middle-stage researchers into seven separate pods of up to 400 people, each concentrating on a specific disease grouping, such as cancer, psychiatry and respiratory and inflammatory diseases.
Today, seven Centers of Excellence for Drug Discovery manage the progression of drugs in the middle of the pipeline. Each group controls its own budget and decides which projects to pursue. Glaxo gives each center funding based on the number of good compounds in its labs, which means the more productive ones get more money. The scientists benefit, too, receiving bonuses if they contribute to the discovery of promising new drugs.
Because it can take up to 10 years to develop a drug, the full impact of Glaxo’s experiment is still unknown. But the number of drugs entering intermediate human trials has tripled over the premerger level, Glaxo says. And the company is expanding into new therapeutic areas where it was once weak, including cancer and cardiology.