Glaxo Mimics Carmaker to Speed Vaccine

Using the "one roof" management technique developed by Renault, the British pharma rushed its HPV vaccine to close the gap with rival Merck

by Kerry Capell

It's potentially the most lucrative vaccine ever developed: An innovative inoculation that protects against the human papilloma virus (HPV), the main cause of cervical cancer—the second deadliest female cancer worldwide. And for Britain's GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which on Mar. 29 submitted its Cervarix vaccine to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval, it's also a major driver of future success, perhaps contributing up to one-third of sales and profit growth over the next five years.

But GSK, one of two companies targeting the market, almost missed its window of opportunity. Four years ago, GSK Bio, the British company's vaccine division based in Rixensart, Belgium, discovered it was more than two years behind archrival Merck (MRK), based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., which was also developing an HPV vaccine.

GSK realized that if it didn't find a way to close the gap fast, the battle for market share would be lost before it had begun. "We knew we had a major asset with our vaccine but if we didn't want to lose it, we had to accelerate the pace of development dramatically," says Dr. Philippe Monteyne, GSK Bio's vice-president of global vaccine development.

Under One Roof

So GSK borrowed a technique from the auto industry known as "one roof." France's Renault pioneered the technique: By plucking experts from various disciplines across the company and putting them "under one roof"—that is, full time on one project, in one location, reporting to a single leader—the carmaker was able to slash the development time of its compact car, the Twingo, by 18 months.

GSK Bio adopted a similar tactic and cut the development time of Cervarix in half. Instead of filing for approval at the end of 2008 as planned, "one roof" allowed GSK Bio to do it two-and-a-half years earlier than expected in Europe, and 18 months earlier in the U.S. If approved, as analysts expect it will be, Cervarix could be on the market in the U.S. within six months.

Convincing management to try the one roof approach wasn't easy, though. Development projects in the pharmaceutical industry often last more than a decade. Before switching to one roof, 80% of the people working on Cervarix spent only about 20% of their time on it. Instead of concentrating on the development of one vaccine at a time, researchers, marketing, and regulatory staff all oversaw numerous projects at various stages of development.

Same-Day Decisions

The question was, could a company with more than 20 vaccines under development afford to concentrate its resources and its talent on just one product? With its stake in a market—potentially worth $8 billion within three years—in jeopardy, GSK Bio decided to take the risk at the end of 2004. The aim of one roof, says Fabrice Enderlin, GSK Bio's vice-president of human resources, who suggested the plan, was to get employees "to live, dream, and sleep cervical cancer vaccine development."

Management hand-picked top people for the group—from research to marketing to regulatory affairs. In the course of a weekend, the new 80-person team was relocated from various offices across the Rixensart campus to one building with a central Cervarix "war room." Instead of scheduling formal meetings between departments, a process that used to take weeks, the Cervarix team held impromptu meetings in hallways or the cafeteria. The result: faster decision making. Instead of taking weeks, major decisions such as the design of clinical trials or the investment needed to scale up manufacturing were made the same day.