Where to go from here?



Hey, Bessie, you're looking tasty...
Photo credit: cleantech.com

The news of layoffs at Abbott is certainly hard to take; even though we should all be inured to the constant drumbeat of news about job cutting at big pharma companies, (to me) it is still really hard to take. Each job lost is an affected human being, a family put under stress and coworkers with (potentially) survivor's guilt and sadness in their hearts.

Over at "In the Pipeline", entropyGain makes an interesting set of suggestions for moving forward and a prediction about pharma job growth:

Clearly, it is more difficult than ever to succeed as a drug-hunter in larger companies, and if we do, we usually remain a dairy cow -- fed enough to make some milk but slaughtered when the investors need a little earnings meat. Startups may not be any easier - undercapitalized, underresourced-- hunting with bow's and arrows again, starving often but eating what we kill.

So what can we as scientists do to help our industry? Maybe a little more public service and consideration for our peers. Accept that request to review a journal article or sit on a study section - don't let that crap get in the journals or get funded. Cut some slack to the startup pitching your BD [CJ's note: business development] group when you sit on the diligence team. Look hard at the data they have and try not to let your company spend hundreds of millions on red wine extract, but if that little startup doesn't have chronic data from your favorite 4 animal models, and yet the molecule is good, maybe you can help BD find a way to structure a deal to get the data and collaborate. When a restructuring does happen and there's ton's of unused "junk" lying around -- find a way to get it to the local startup community. We live on that "junk" a lot of the time.

One thing is for sure, domestic job growth for scientists will only come from small companies for the foreseeable future.

It is difficult for me (as a relative novice) to know if eG's ideas are good or not; certainly, the attitude of a typical BD group is "show us what you got" and not "sure, we can help you" and rightly so. That being said, I don't really see job growth coming from the big companies anytime soon. Let's hope he's right that there is some to be had, somewhere.