1. 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?
3. 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
Pharma R&D IS a Challenging Career
4. 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
5. 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
Universal Concerns from
Colleges,Universities, Faculty and Students
6. 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
7. Changing Definitions
Biotech today is not Biotech of the 20th 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. •Bioelectronics
•Cell biology
•Stem cells
•Phenotypic screening
•Structural biology
•Science technologies of the year
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/05/3497863/science-magazine-
picks-top-breakthroughs.html
•Crispr
•Cancer immunotherapy
•Bioinformatics
•Proteomics/chemoproteomics
•Biomarkers
•Synthetic biochemistry
•Not – traditional drug screening, animal models, natural products, doing everything in-
house, doing one thing for your career,
What’s Hot and What’s Not
16. 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