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Published online 9 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/454144a

When there's no room to grow

To maintain profits in the face of rising development costs and slow drug pipelines, big pharmaceutical firms are trying to cut back. Heidi Ledford examines how GlaxoSmithKline has tried to adapt.

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  • Could it be that the villain preventing pharma from millennial success is the industrialized/rational drug discovery paradigm? Can they go back and blend the preceding more physiologically-oriented paradigm with structure-based drug design? Will systems biology mature in time to bring radically new perspectives to drug discovery? Can the industry survive quarter-to-quarter stock market vetting? Stay tuned. It's pretty exciting stuff if your job isn't at stake.

    • 11 Jul, 2008
    • Posted by: Ken Rubenstein