Mother of mercy, is this the end of medchem?

Also from today's C&EN, an article from Rich Mullin on where non-profits are stepping into the gap that Big Pharma has left in US medchem funding (emphasis CJ's):

Contract research organizations, or CROs, have a natural tendency to bridge gaps in the landscape of pharmaceutical R&D. As laboratories for hire, CROs have emerged as vital agents in screening compounds, developing synthetic routes, and supporting clinical trials. They provide expertise and infrastructure to virtual drug companies, small biotech firms, and even big pharmaceutical makers that lack necessary resources. Increasingly, though, the research conducted by CROs is being funded by nonprofit foundations and government agencies. The trend reflects a tectonic shift in how drugs are discovered in the pharmaceutical industry. For Western CROs, which are benefiting most from the trend, the new business is helping to offset contracts lost to competitors based in India and China. 

Traditional funders of drug discovery are retrenching, explains Walter H. Moos, vice president of the Biosciences Division of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute and CRO. Venture capital for early-stage drug discovery has been declining since the recession. Major drug companies have become increasingly risk averse, committing to acquire compounds only in later stages of development. And the traditional commercial support for projects crossing the so-called valley of death—the early stretch of the long drug development process—has all but evaporated.

“But nature abhors a vacuum,” Moos says. Nontraditional support is rushing into the space, and governments are doing more of the research that was traditionally the domain of commercial entities. [snip]

...The agency’s [NIH's] Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, encompassing 16 NIH institutes and research centers, is using a similar virtual pharma approach. Several CROs have been awarded contracts to support research. In addition to AMRI, SRI International and Southern Research Institute have been hired to perform drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics screening and other services. “We have solicited applications from small business and academic researchers around the country,” Farkas says. “Successful applicants will be plugged into the network.” 

The agency’s support of early-stage drug development, Farkas says, may reflect a permanent realignment in the field of drug discovery and development as big pharma embraces a streamlined business model. Shifts in the industry, she says, will affect where NIH targets support along the drug discovery and development continuum.

I can't imagine how this is going to end well for US-based medicinal chemists.  Governments and non-profits will be not able to sustain US medchem CROs. NIH cannot possibly keep up the level of support over time; budget pressures will become too great over the coming years and something else will become more pressing.

I lament that it seems that medicinal chemistry has gone from a proud area of research in the late 1990's* to something of a boutique industry, supported by charities and benevolent governments.

Best wishes to all of us.

*If I had to choose one reason I became an organic chemist, it was the story of the Merck HIV protease inhibitors. Considering that, when I was a teenager, I was practically assured that 1 in 3 people I knew would become HIV-positive, the transformation of HIV to a chronic condition seemed amazing and almost entirely due to medicinal chemists. 

What are the long-term consequences of losing mid-career pharma scientists?

Susan Ainsworth's article in C&EN on chemists about finding new careers has been posted for a week or two; it's worth reading (said the guy who was quoted). The full comment that I made to Ms. Ainsworth on the long-term consequences of retooling are below:

The core of the retooling issue in regards to the long-term is: who is retooling? If extremely senior people are getting out of the industry, it's probably a net loss to the chemical enterprise, but they're more likely to remain somewhat connected to the industry via consulting, etc. If large groups of chemists that have been in the industry for 5 to 15 years begin leaving the industry and "retooling", I believe that this would be a very serious issue, in that their experience, leadership and potential positive changes they would have made to the industry would be lost.

The analogy I would make is this: back in 2006 or so, there were a spate of articles about the mid-rank officers who were leaving the military. For example, Maj. John Nagl was considered one of the US Army's leading thinkers on counterinsurgency theory; he left in 2008 (?). Now that he's employed by CNAS, he's not exerting his influence directly on the military. That's a net loss for the future, I'd think. If he were to retool and move out of the policy sphere completely, that loss would be even greater.

There's probably a break-even point for investment in a pharmaceutical labor pool; I'm going to guess that it takes at least 5 years to train a medicinal chemist to the point that they're at the top of their career potential. If you're shuttering sites and laying people off, some of those people and some of the potential long-term gain to pharma will be lost for good. While some of the more talented scientists would probably be picked up, some other talented people will decide "pharma is not for me" and leave. If the job market for medicinal chemists does not recover, the loss will likely be permanent.

What percentage of these mid-career scientists can pharma lose before there are real, negative long-term consequences to the industry? Lame to say, but we're about to find out.

What's happening to pharmaceutical synthetic chemistry jobs?: the Lowe/Laird/Anon hypothesis

I. The past was better than now

In April of this year, Derek Lowe made a statement that I found interesting, but not proven: "there are far fewer med-chem jobs out there today than there were five years ago." Later in the post, Dr. Lowe tends to define the term by "the number of well-paid US-based positions at large pharma companies."

For the most part, I think he's right. The list of former large pharma sites listed by one of my commenters recently is too large to list and too large to ignore -- not all of those positions could have been resorbed by their parent/merged companies.

However, I have been unable to locate a census-type count of industrial medicinal chemists; to my eye, this would be the only way of falsifying Derek's hypothesis.

II. Now is not good. 

On July 16, Trevor Laird (the editor of Organic Process Research and Development) wrote a depressing and truthful editorial titled "Is there a Future for Organic Chemists in the Pharmaceutical Industry outside China and India?"  He discusses the current state of affairs ably; I suggest you read the whole thing. But here's the key portion:

"The impending closure of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) sites in the UK and Italy, and the announcement by Astra Zeneca of the closure of the Loughborough (Charnwood) site with the loss of 1200 R&D staff along with the loss of jobs at the Avonmouth manufacturing site mean that many scientists in process R&D in the UK are falling on hard times. At the same time, Pfizer has cut staff in Medicinal Chemistry and Process R&D at Sandwich, UK, after the merger with Wyeth and has reduced the number of manufacturing sites in Ireland and elsewhere. So in the UK, the three major companies carrying out medicinal chemistry and process R&D are all reducing staffing levels. Now, where do those out of work, or for that matter new recruits from universities, find jobs? I wish I knew the answer!... In the United States I am sure the situation is no better with many major multinationals announcing layoffs in the last year, and even the biotech sector is not immune to similar problems."

His advice to his colleagues? Find a CRO position or a job with a private pharmaceutical concern that isn't affected by all the merger-mania and keep networking. Good advice, but (as he would likely admit) there's not a lot of positions there, especially in the Western half of the world.

III. The future isn't looking too bright either

A recent comment (by the mellifluous sounding Anon906p071710) summarized his/her thinking this way:

"Almost every industrial chemist I know who has been laid off remains unemployed. I am in the biotech/pharma industry and know of hundreds of synthetic chemists who have lost their jobs as pharma/biotech/ag/chemical industry has moved jobs off shore/downsized and as biotech companies focused their little remaining money on clinical development.

The real question is: what is the unemployment rate of industrial chemists who did medicinal, synthetic, and other laboratory-based organic chemistry work? If you were highly trained as a medicinal/synthetic or other organic specialty, you are not likely to move into green inorganic material science without going back to graduate school.

Unless I am missing something, I do not see our industrial jobs ever coming back, so a whole generation of organic chemists will be lost, thrown out like so much useless trash. The profession will wither away outside of academic departments."

To me, Anon906p's comment really has two relevant parts: A) the industrial synthesis jobs aren't coming back and that B) retraining synthetic/medicinal chemists for material scientists is more-or-less impractical. I hate to say something so trite, but only time will tell. (I hope he's wrong.)

Derek Lowe tends to agree in his April post: "I hate to sound like this, but I think there's been too much of a shift in recent years for anything to undo it. Costs have gone up, drug-development success rates have (at best) not increased, and there are cheaper ways to get a good amount of work done which used to cost more. Which of these things are going to change back, and how?"

IV. What does this mean? 

I don't know -- nothing good, I suspect. Over the next year, I plan to try to figure it out. I hope you'll help me.