Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - October 2008 - (Page 15)

Instant Pharma In pharma’s changing employment landscape, companies that are downsizing still need to ensure they have affordable and reliable access to the right skills at the right time. Paul Branthwaite of TranScrip Partners advocates an approach that provides an ‘expert when needed’ solution. T he pharma industry is at crossroads — an inevitable consequence of stagnation in revenue streams and ever-rising costs of delivering new pipelines. In many ways, this serves to show how successful the industry has been in addressing diseases during the last 20 years. Drugs are doing their their jobs efficiently and safely. However, by 2012 the leading eight pharma groups will lose 14–41% of their existing revenues, because of patent expiry blockbuster treatments (Figure 1). Meanwhile, the costs of developing drugs continue to increase linearly while the number of novel drugs coming to market is falling (Figure 2). In 2006, the aggregated spend on R&D per US drug licence awarded reached $2 billion (e1.41 billion), up 100% in 5 years. This reality has impacted all aspects of the business in terms of the therapeutic areas being researched (the low-hanging fruit of unmet clinical needs having largely disappeared), with reimbursability and stringent cost efficacy adding extra hurdles. An era of downsizing Many of the mergers/acquisitions in recent years within or by Big Pharma are symptomatic of a desire to reduce costs, as well as to acquire replacement pipeline relatively cheaply, in the face of continued downward pressures on prices from remuneration authorities, stiffer regulatory requirements and increasing manufacturing costs. Companies are now induced to start cutting their core headcounts including, for the first time, skilled R&D, chemistry, manufacturing and controls, and regulatory affairs staff. This is to be expected when companies may only have one or two drugs in development in a specific therapeutic area at any one time, and sometimes none in peri-registration phases. It is difficult to justify the high cost of permanent staffing when the expertise to take a drug forward may only be needed occasionally. An example of how the requirement shifts for one type of expertise can be seen in Figure 3. Pharma has to increasingly look outside its own resources for such expertise, or even for routine capacity at critical times. The reduction in permanent staff has further consequences at a number of levels, especially as many of the individuals who are exiting Big Pharma groups are the same, inexperienced people who previously could cross multiple therapeutic areas and functions to address capacity shortfall issues. An associated, longer-term problem already being seen by headhunters is an evolving skills shortage in some key areas as the training grounds of Big Pharma contract. So how and where are we to train and continually develop the next generation of drug experts? Skills when needed There is a necessity for highly skilled pharma drug value chain development staff at certain times in a drug’s life, but not necessarily all of the time. Big Pharma and small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will, nevertheless, ballyscanlon/Getty Images 19 Meet unmet needs Natalie Douglas on named patient programmes 22 Pharma in Turkey Interviews with the country’s leading executives 37 Last words Who said what in pharma’s last four weeks 3 News The monthly round-up of European stories

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - October 2008

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - October 2008
Contents
News and Analysis
Calendar
BioFutures
Strategy Fundamentals
Executive Recruitment: Small Company, Big Career
Executive Recruitment: Instant Pharma
Named Patient Programmes
Executive Review: Turkey

Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - October 2008