What Will Pfizer’s R&D Look Like a Year from Now?

By Jonathan D. Rockoff

Pfizer’s huge R&D shop is even bigger now that the company has swallowed Wyeth. To get a sense of the changes that could be in store, the Health Blog spoke today with the company’s two top R&D execs — Martin Mackay, a Pfizer veteran who will lead small-molecule work, and Mikael Dolsten, a former Wyeth executive who will oversee vaccines and biotech drugs.

Following a popular trend in the industry, Pfizer will continue to decentralize much of its R&D, which will be spread across 18 different units. But Mackay and Dolsten also want to avoid creating a bunch of insular labs that never talk to each other.

One interesting example: A unit will be charged with looking at multiple uses of drugs under development throughout the company. That makes a certain amount of sense, given the way many drugs were developed for one use then went on to find success by treating something quite different.

More broadly, Mackay and Dolsten said, certain projects — cancer vaccines, for example — lend themselves to collaborations across different research units. And some functions, such as designing drugs or probing safety risks, can be done company-wide. Otherwise, Dolsten said, “you create as a side effect a tremendous silo mentality and you don’t leverage the big company.”

“There are elements of drug discovery and development where you just need scale,” Mackay said.

Pfizer and Wyeth’s combined R&D budgets add up to some $11 billion a year. Cuts are on the way, but Mackay and Dolsten didn’t give us any new details on that front.

Those details, including which programs will be terminated and which sites will be closed, are expected in the next month or two.

Photo: Associated Press