In the News: Pipeline Woes

From Chemical and Engineering News (Ann Thayer reporting):

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i18/8618notw9.html

Major drug companies have been taking their lumps recently as drug candidates fail to impress regulators and falter in clinical trials. These setbacks bode ill for the industry overall. At FDA's current approval rate, the number of new drug entities reaching the market in 2008 could hit a new low.

Merck & Co. is among the hardest hit. The company received a nonapprovable letter from FDA on April 28 for its new cholesterol-lowering drug Cordaptive, a combination of niacin and laropiprant.

(snip)

On April 25, the FDA also said no to an allergy drug containing Merck's Singulair and Schering-Plough's Claritin. This letdown comes after the partners reported poor clinical results in March for the cholesterol-lowering combination drug Vytorin.

(snip)

Meanwhile, Bristol-Myers Squibb and its partner Medarex learned that FDA wants additional clinical data to demonstrate the benefit of ipilimumab, an antibody designed to improve immune responses against cancer cells. The request means the companies will not be able to file for approval this year.

Bad news came earlier in development for other firms. Partners Genentech and Biogen Idec said last week that Rituxan failed to meet any of the goals in a late-stage trial of lupus patients. The antibody drug is approved for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And Sanofi-Aventis reported initial results showing no benefit from its new antidepressant, saredutant.

So will this latest news mean more layoffs in the pharmaceutical industry?

Merck has already annouced it will cut 1,200 jobs from its sales force as its stock price dropped 7% on the day of the FDA announcement. Stay tuned for more on pipeline woes.....

Current Job Market for Synthetic Chemists

For those in the chemical field, I probably don't have to tell you the state of the job market. For the uninitiated, it sucks. Tighter R&D budgets, less government funding, outsourcing of jobs, patent issues (these include patents expiring and patent infringement problems), and the ever increasing expectations of shareholders have led to routine yearly layoffs in the sector.


After a quick survey of the web, the following is a short list of companies that recently announced layoffs (since 2007, with dates of announcements-courtsey of the AP). It doesn't include many smaller start-ups and biotechs that were either bought out by a larger company or shut down after their business model/drug candidate failed.


--Schering-Plough Corp., 5,500 jobs, 10 percent of staff (April 2)
--Wyeth, 5,000 jobs, or 10 percent, Jan. 25
--Novartis AG, more than 3,760 jobs, or 4 percent (Oct. 2007-Jan. 2008)
--Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., about 4,200, 10 percent (Dec. 2007)
--Bayer AG, 1,500 jobs, 1.5 percent (Nov. 2007)
--GlaxoSmithKline PLC, unspecified jobs (Oct. 2007; I noticed where they announced a second round in recent days.)
--King Pharmaceuticals Inc., 560 jobs, or 20 percent (Oct. 2007)
--Johnson & Johnson, up to 4,800 jobs, or 4 percent (July 2007)
--AstraZeneca PLC, 7,600 jobs, 4 percent (July 2007)
--Encysive Pharmaceuticals Inc., 150 jobs, 70 percent (June 2007)
--Pfizer Inc., 10,000 jobs, or 10 percent (Jan. 2007)
--Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc., 267 jobs, or 76 percent (Jan. 2007)

Prior major restructurings:
--Merck & Co., trimmed 7,200 jobs since December 2005.
--Eli Lilly & Co., trimmed more than 5,000 jobs, about 11 percent, since 2004 and continuing.


Of course, it didn't always used to be this way.


As a grad student in the late 1990s, I had been cautiously optimistic about the prospects of my chosen field. The pharma sector was booming.


I saw people getting snatched out of our group (natural products/synthetic organic) and given money hand over fist to work in pharma. The pay at large pharma for someone just out of grad school had reached dizzying heights. Large signing bonuses were so common that if you got one below $10K, people thought something must be wrong with you.


I held my breath and prayed the market wouldn't tank before I graduated. However, the dot-com bust, 9/11 and the following recession occurred about a year before I defended. Just my luck.


Good thing there are these things called post-docs. Yeah, right. Two more years of working 80 hour weeks for slave wages. I did two post-docs for varying reasons but one of the largest factors was that the job market was poor. I count myself lucky though--I know many people who are on their 3rd and 4th postdocs. Academe was able to absorb many of the chemists industry couldn't but based on anecdotal evidence, this is trend is slowing. Competition for available postdocs is increasing.


So my fellow lab rats, keep those resumes/CVs up-to-date and keep building new skills to set yourself apart from the crowd. And good luck.