THE PIPELINE PROBLEM.(The Talk of the Town)(pharmaceutical industry)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-FEB-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Merck is one of history's most innovative corporations. It devotes three billion dollars a year and ten thousand people to the research and development of new drugs. So here's a question: How many drugs for diabetes do you think all these men and women, this army of scientists, managed to come up with in the past four years? None. How many anti-cancer drugs? Zero. How many drugs that fight infectious diseases? Zero. Since 2000, in fact, Merck has introduced just three new drugs. Drug development is hard, but, by any measure, eking out less than one product a year is no way to make a living in the major leagues.

Profitable as "big pharma" remains--Pfizer made twelve billion dollars last year--a deep sense of anxiety prevails in the industry. That's because Merck is no exception: most drug companies have what's...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.