Agile Pharma, Where Art Thou?

It's no secret that the heyday of Big Pharma research is a thing of the past. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, many of them never to practice science again. 

What's behind this trend? Did all the Big Pharmas down a whole bottle of crazy pills? Of course not. 

The order of the day is decentralization. The old research model relied on a few massive campuses filled with thousands of scientists. It worked for decades, but started to break down about fifteen years ago. The problem was an over-reliance on a single business model. It didn't help that the model was prone to bloat and waste, either. Bureaucracy and silos were tolerable while the low hanging fruit was still on the tree. Not anymore. The model that aimed to produce multibillion dollar blockbusters has hit a few snags. 

So now there's a steady stream of deals and collaborations to go with the layoffs. Maybe all the pharma CEOs read Frans Johannson's The Click Moment. His advice is to make many small bets, then double down on what works. And that's exactly what we see. Big Pharma's new partners are VC-backed biotechs, nonprofits, academia, and more. 

The emerging consensus is that speed to market is just as important as having a great drug. A study from the Boston Consulting Group explains why. A new drug must be first or second to market, and be first or second-best in its class, and it can't be second in both categories. Don't bother with anything else. It's winner take all.

From: Schultze, U., Ringel, M. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2013, 12, 419-420.

A careless organization that's ahead of the competition can squander their opportunity through costly but avoidable mistakes. That's exactly what kaizen aims to fix. Companies need to get better at getting better. Maybe acceleration to market is a better term? 

Tools like kanban take the mystery and waste out of any kind of process, even drug discovery. And just like software developers, pharma researchers are knowledge workers. It isn't voodoo. It's science, and it follows an articulable process that's amenable to improvement. It's high time we turned our highly trained minds on ourselves. To echo Peter Drucker, we need to examine how we work just as much as we examine what we work on. 

Software developers borrowed kanban from the manufacturing industry. They adapted it to fit their needs and innovated new tools like scrum along the way. Likewise, the pharma industry can do the same. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The tools have been there for decades, hiding in plain sight. 

Now is Big Pharma's time to embrace the concepts of Agile and kaizen all the way from discovery through post-marketing surveillance. Not just talk about it, but do it using specific tools like kanban. The first to do so will eat their competitor's lunch. Bet on it.