Re taking more than a day, I agree: one pharma CEO issued an edict that a moratoruim would be placed on hiring consultants. What he missed though was the number of retainer contracts in place that totaled in the millions.

You have my vote for “king of pharma for a day” (is 1 day enough?) to dull the impact of “management consultants” as I have been “trained” over & over (yet Theory Z is new one to me). I usual could pick up small useful things for myself but most never got implemented before the replacement introduced. Better results obtained with technical consultants but one still has to worry about agendas and forthrightness at times.

DC, sure this is a big stretch currently but is that more a function of complexity of the biology/chemistry understanding (lack of) than the computer technology? The latter capability is a probably ahead, both have a long way to go and 12 years does seem unreachable, but conceptionally possible (I was once big SciFi fan though).

The Pharma business is controlled by the realities of regulatory oversight that provide significant contraint to how “out of the box” we can think and work. There is also the consistent pattern that when we can deliver more regulatory agencies are quick to ask for it. Just ask anyone who has been in the business for 30 years–it has been a steadily increasing burden to get a drug on the market, and every new technical advance is offset by new requirements.

Anyone who thinks you can construct virtual man on a computer must have been reading too much science fiction.

You can’t even compute de novo the affinity of a ligand for a binding site when you know the crystal structures of both. You can’t predict the effect of single amino acid mutations in a single protein molecule with any confidence.

Anything more complicated is just pie in the sky, or, more likely, irresponsible hype. But that is what happens when you hand over science to people who are intoxicated with managerial gobbledygook.

Reading advice from consultants is like waving a red flag to my bull. I believe their only utility is tactical and never for strategy. Unfortunately I’ve seen them take (another overstatement) over this function within companies whether it is for commercial or R & D functions. If I could be king of pharma for one day I’d create a permanent wedge between managing partners and senior pharma execs.

Condor, thanks for the reference to the Wired article. I’ll look forward to reading it.

He does admit to this being intentionally provocative to stimulate discussion which indeed is good point because changes necessary to spur lackluster innovation. There has been a cyclical problem when every few years a new drug discovery panacea comes along, gets over-hyped, bought into by management, then fades in realities that face pharmaceutical R&D.

The requirement for collaboration of industry, academics/NIH and Reg Agencies is well spoken. He is also correct about Six Sigma and other top-down “new” management/quality approaches not being too effective in R&D (at least the discovery part, development can use elements). I don’t think scientists alone can come up with better drugs but pharma has seemed to often lose sight of that underlining motivation with leadership that have wandered from core.

That July issue (article not yet online in full-text, so no link — sorry!) cover posits, breathlessly — “The End of Science”:

http://www.wired.com

The sub-title on this very-longish article reads “The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the peta-byte age.”

The thesis is that pure science — the “What if?” line of questioning is being replaced by the “What do we already know?” line of questioning — using vast data-mining efforts — essentially let’s sort what we already know WON’T work, or is true — but is too-subtle to tease-out, without the aid of massively parallel processing — of petabytes of prior data.

Actually — I think Patel, and Wired, has it (mostly) right, Bob. If the data-mining Patel talks about could narrow the field of drug candidates by just 10 percent, a significant amount of research “waste” could be avoided.

Now, to be clear — good science requires that one be wrong far more often than one is right — but there is no rule that one must waste money in the process. This might focus the effort.

Read the Wired article for the meta-theme to which Patel’s interview speaks. It is the future — I guess the question would be whether that future is 50, or 25, or 5 years off. . . .

Great peice!

How many of these have been proven marginal at best? Total quality improvement, Theory “Z”, management by objectives (showing my age) come to mind.