The Unchanging Face of Drug Discovery

Big pharma has seen better days. Pfizer recently closed its research site in Kent, England — where Viagra was invented — laying off 2,400 people in the process. Pfizer’s position is unusual: Almost 50% of their revenue comes from sales of drugs whose patents will expire within three years. But other firms are experiencing similarly large falls in profits as patents on blockbuster drugs expire.

New models are being suggested for drug discovery, a process which has gone unchanged for years. Chas Bountra of the Structural Genomics Consortium wants to see public-private partnerships, with costs split between charities and pharmaceutical companies. The consortium would work on getting candidate drugs to phase II trials; successful compounds would be auctioned off to the companies that sponsored them. That way, big pharma could stick to what it does best: running large, multicenter trials and marketing new drugs.

Why does drug discovery remain so expensive? Partly because the promise of new technologies, like genomics, to radically speed up drug design by quickly identifying genes and mutations for scientific study hasn’t panned out, despite genome sequencing’s falling costs. Millennium Pharmaceuticals staked its business on genomics producing candidate compounds — with little success.

Another reason is that speeding up the process could sacrifice safety. Futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks the regulatory bureaucracy surrounding drug trials will have to change if companies are able to innovate as drug-development technologies improve exponentially. But no one seems able to come up with a better (and safe) alternative to current, slow, labor-intensive methods.

Bountra’s idea is sound. He wants to improve the efficiency of the division of labor in drug design, giving the job of drug discovery to academics. But there are no quick fixes, and short of waiting for genomic data to become a useful source of drug targets, big pharma’s model is here to stay.

The Unchanging Face of Drug Discovery

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