johnnyboy

Not Impressed by Pfizer's CEO

It's pretty obvious Kindler would be apt at spouting well-polished but meaningless corporate-speak blather - after all he's just a lawyer, and his prior experience is in managing food and restaurant chains. He has no real scientific background. Since becoming CEO he has basically been slashing and burning the R&D side of Pfizer, shutting down research sites left and right. Morale at the Groton site is non-existant, and the lawyers have taken over, trying to control every aspect of the work. Scientific research is the backbone of any pharmaceutical company - to place as its CEO someone who has no idea what research means is basically a death sentence.

Did Novartis's Research Site Turn Out as Planned?

Where did the talk go ? The way all talk by executives go, ie from their bottoms, up in the air, and evaporating. Making pronouncements like like "we reinvent the way drugs are made" is in the executives' job description. It's not something that actually has to happen. There are not a million ways drugs can be developed, the pathways and actual methods are pretty much known. What can be tried is some fine-tuning - skipping a step here, trying a new technology there, but nothing that would actually revolutionize anything, despite what you hear from the boardrooms and press releases. I worked at Pfizer a few years back, when the company opened their own "new paradigm" research site in Cambridge (didn't everyone ?). From what I could tell, the stuff getting done over there was pretty esoteric, ie things that might, maybe, perhaps, lead to quicker discovery progress, if it all works out, in 10 years time or more. Meanwhile, the things that actually need to be done to develop actual drugs, and do it now, don't really change that much.