Big Pharma’s failure to innovate threatens more than their bottom line, says robert matthews |
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Giants are renowned for their liberal use of the axe, though not usually on themselves. Even so, the decision of Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, to chop 10,000 of its employees - 10 per cent of the workforce - should come as little surprise, as it has been clear for some time that the fairytale is over for Big Pharma.
Once upon a time, the drugs industry seemed to have a licence to print money. A steady stream of 'blockbuster' drugs flowed from its research labs, each one earning billions of pounds a year for its creators. Their names became the stuff of legend, as did their powers: Tagamet made stomach ulcers vanish, Prozac cheered up depressives, Viagra revived dead marriages.
But now Big Pharma has discovered its goose no longer lays golden eggs. Pfizer's swingeing cuts follow the disastrous results of clinical trials of a cholesterol-lowering drug |
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| The industry now spends over £30bn a year on research but the numbers of new drugs has remained static |
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it hoped would turn into a nice little earner to take over from Lipitor, the world's biggest-selling drug that earned the company over £6bn in 2005. With Lipitor losing patent protection in 2011, Pfizer has nothing in the pipeline to make up the loss.
Nor is it alone: industry analysts have been warning that other Big Pharma names like GlaxoSmithKline may also be forced to slash their workforces.
The golden goose of pharmacological research may be failing to come up with the goods, but it is not for want of trying. The industry now spends over £30bn a year on research and development - 10 times more in real terms than it did in the early 1980s - but the numbers of new drugs being approved each year has remained static. Time and again promising drugs emerge from the labs, only to fail dismally in patients.
What is going wrong? One clue comes from the story of NXY-059, the would-be blockbuster drug developed by AstraZeneca that died a death last autumn. Research on animals and small numbers of patients 
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