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OCTOBER 4, 2004
"It's a Perfect Storm" for Drugmakers Glaxo CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier on the industry's hardships and how his company is improving its search for new drugs Times are tough for the pharmaceutical industry. Pricing pressures, stiff generic competition, and declining research and development productivity are dealing a major blow to drugmakers. On Sept. 9, BusinessWeek London Correspondent Kerry Capell interviewed Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO of Britain's GlaxoSmithKline (GSK ), the world's second-largest drugmaker, about how his company is weathering the storm. Edited excerpts from their conversation follow: Q: The drug industry is taking a lot of heat about the cost of prescription drugs. A: There's a recognition among the political parties that the American consumer is overpaying and Europeans are basically taking a free ride. But we're caught between a rock and a hard place because we didn't create the monster, that's for sure. We don't like it, either. We would love to have a global single price in all industrial countries, and maybe another, lower price for all developing countries, but that's just a dream. Because every attempt we have made to do it failed because a government here or a government there tried to get a better deal and put our price down. Q: How much political pressure are you under? A: Tremendous. It's a perfect storm. The problem is, everyone's under impression that the pharmaceutical industry makes a lot of money. That was true 10 years ago. But since then, we have had two major changes: Pricing pressure and productivity decline, and a very efficient genericization of drugs. A decade ago, the generic makers were slow, and you didn't lose everything day one. Now, it's like switching off the light. So you have a much tougher environment. In the past, yes, the industry could raise prices whenever they felt like it more or less. That's over. People should be worried. They should say, "Wait a minute, let's not kill the golden goose here. We do want those folks to try and discover new drugs." The political pressure is very important to me because it could break the back of pharmaceutical industry in a fundamental way. There's nothing that could replace the pharma industry in terms of drug discovery. Q: GSK has come in for criticism about its lack of new drugs. A: We have had a long dry spell pre- and post-merger. But now we're seeing fruits of our efforts because we have changed R&D in a fundamental way, more than any other pharmaceutical company. It has been a long road, and there was a lot of inertia in the research process. When you switch things around, nothing happens for several years. But we're at the point where we can see the first wave of new products coming out of pipeline, and we like what we see. Nothing is home yet, but we're getting closer. Q: What were some of those changes? A: We have removed all the layers in the organization and created seven autonomous Centers of Excellence for Drug Discovery (CEDDS). The typical R&D operation that one of our competitors might have -- between the chemists on the bench and the head of R&D -- [has] five to six layers. When we had that structure before the merger, I had difficulty in knowing who was truly responsible for Project X. Now we have just two layers, it has improved transparency and accountability. Q: Both GlaxoWellcome and Smith Kline Beecham invested heavily in new technologies. Are those investments starting to pay off? A: It has improved dramatically the output of discovery. At the same time, I also know that a fool with a tool is still a fool. So you can have a great tool, but if scientists don't use it effectively, it's completely useless. So I don't have any illusions. Even with superior technology, there's no guarantee of success. Q: What are some of the more promising new drugs in the pipeline? A: The next four products are pretty exciting. They will be a big test of the new approach. They're all coming within the next two to three years, tops. The first is a dual kinase inhibitor for the treatment of breast and other types of cancer. It's extremely safe and orally available. The second is a COX-2 inhibitor for pain and inflammation. But its unique characteristic is that it crosses the brain-blood barrier, so it interferes with the central nervous system and has the potential to treat neuropathic pain such as back pain. Then we have a long-acting cortical steroid that's an improvement on the existing family. It isn't a breakthrough drug, but it's pretty much the best you can hope for in cortical steroid. This is important because Advair will one day need to be replaced by something better, and one of the components of Advair is a cortical steroid, and we think we have one that's better. This drug will be used in rhinitis, and we're very encouraged with the clinical data so far. There is 162, a drug for treatment of conditions such as depression and some anxieties. This one is a bit earlier, in the sense that we're still working on the dosage. It's a very interesting way to attack depression, and it has many advantages over classic antidepressants such as Seroxat and Prozac because it has no sexual side effects and no weight gain but equivalent efficacy. Q: Are you trying to keep more compounds in phase 2 studies longer? A: Yes. It's better to make all your guessing in phase 2 and none in phase 3. When you go to phase 3, you should just be repeating your successful profile because losing a drug in phase 3 is very expensive and very painful. Losing it or delaying it in phase 2 is better as a strategy. Of course, the best way is to do it right the first time, but sometimes conditions don't allow for that. Q: What about your vaccine business? A: We have two vaccines just around the corner: rotarix, for rotavirus, which has just been approved in Mexico -- we're still waiting for the final data, but it looks clear. We also have cervarix for cervical cancer, which is still a couple of years away. The latter is a big breakthrough vaccine -- Merck (MRK ) also has a slightly different version of the vaccine for this -- but this is a vaccine which stops cervical cancer in its tracks and one that every woman should take. The vaccine operation is a fabulous business. Fifteen years ago, we were a no-show in vaccines, but we came from behind, and today we are -- along with Aventis Pastuer -- the largest vaccine biz in world. It proves that with the right science and with the right model, you can create a vaccine business from scratch. Our model was exactly the one we're [using] in the drug business: a center of excellence doing discovery inside and outside collaborations with biotech and academia. It's also run as an autonomous unit and not coalesced into some kind of a bureaucracy.
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