Pharmaceutical Industry R&D

An inside-out look at trends and career opportunities

Lots of promise but little delivered in the

way of new drugs

Vastly reduced work force in the

Pharmaceutical R&D industry
Or is it?
 Eroom’s Law
Pharmaceutical Research is in trouble
Drugs per billion US $

Scannell et al Nat Rev Drug Discovery 11, 191 (2012)

 Pharma R&D IS a Challenging Career

The easy stuff has been done

Complexity growing exponentially
Reimbursement for new drugs?
Better is not always sufficient for insurance companies
Lower acceptance of side effects – questioning
approved drugs
Bad press – some deserved and some not
 Challenges
Patent cliffs
Exploding costs of drug discovery and development
Much higher hurdles for approval for major indications
Efficacy not enough – how is it better? And what does better
mean?
Quality of life, dosage,side affect profile
Blockbuster strategy is dead
Niche markets
Orphan indications
High failure (attrition) rate – have to cover cost of failures in pricing
of successful drugs
Generic competition
Big Pharma moving more toward Development and away from
Discovery
 Universal Concerns from
Colleges,Universities, Faculty and Students

Need more students to go into the sciences

What do we tell students about opportunities if
they go into science?
Students want an education which prepares
them for a career – not unempolyment or under-
employment

I believe the opportunities are still

plentiful if you understand the landscape
 Changing Definitions

Pharmaceutical Industry does not equal Big Pharma!

The days of everything being in-house are long gone

The Pharma industry is really a network of big companies, start-
ups, contract research organizations (CRO’s), Academic labs,
research institutes ……..
Big Pharma is reinventing itself to be more nimble – more
biotech-like
 Changing Definitions
Biotech today is not Biotech of the 20 th century
Many biotechs have been swallowed up by large Pharma
Days of biotechs seeing themselves as becoming fully
integrated pharmaceutical companies is gone
Most have a technology or compound they want to sell to
large companies, use to attract a large company to buy them or
become a specialty service provider.
So Biotechs are really an integrated part of the Pharma
Industry today – the source of much early Discovery research
 Key elements of the “new”
Pharma Industry
CROs
Diagnostic companies
Over the counter manufacturers
Generics manufacturers
Medical device developers and manufacturers
New age of bioelectronics
Drug delivery companies
 Opportunities are Growing

Aging population
More chronic indications
Fewer people going into the sciences (or the needed sciences)
Start ups are on the rise again
As big pharma gets smaller CRO’s get bigger
E.g. Covance has more people in R&D than GSK
Outsourcing no longer automatically equates with shipping
jobs to China and India
 What’s Hot and What’s Not
•CROs
•Consortia
•Public private
•Flexibility
•PhD not as much a requirement as in the past
•Working internationally
•Project management
 What’s Hot and What’s
•Bioelectronics
•Cell biology Not
•Stem cells
•Phenotypic screening
•Structural biology
•Science technologies of the year
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/05/3497863/science-magazine-p
icks-top-breakthroughs.html

•Crispr
•Cancer immunotherapy
•Bioinformatics
•Proteomics/chemoproteomics
•Biomarkers
•Synthetic biochemistry

•Not – traditional drug screening, animal models, natural products, doing everything in-
http://www.addconsortium.org/
 Beyond the Lab
Medical writing
Regulatory Affairs
Clin ops
Compliance
QA
Bus Dev (In-licensing and out-licensing)
Business and Technical Operations
Portfolio Management

>85% of jobs in Pharma are outside traditional

R&D but majority are people with science degrees