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IT Helps Pharmaceuticals Develop New Drugs, but the Tools Can't Do It Alone

By Stephanie Overby

October 15, 2002 — CIO — As vice president of worldwide informatics for Pfizer Global R&D, Walter Hauck had been diligent about getting just the right people on his team. He had been charged with integrating the disjointed R&D efforts at the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world. He was supposed to create the tools and processes that would allow scientists and clinicians and marketers and lawyers to work together to introduce Pfizer’s next generation of drugs.

So Hauck hunted for people who knew both IT and science and asked them to join his 1,200-person team. He assigned them to research sites around the globe so that they could learn Pfizer’s business and guide their users through the transformation. He recruited people from the research and development side to join the informatics department.

But Hauck found out that PhDs and dual degrees weren’t enough because most of the people working for him didn’t know diddly about change management. And Hauck didn’t know enough either.

That became clear during the integration of the R&D division of Warner-Lambert, the Morris Plains, N.J.-based drug company Pfizer acquired in 2000. Hauck figured that the simplest, most logical way to handle the changes was to do them all at once. His IT team agreed. At La Jolla Labs in California, for instance, Hauck’s team introduced one new application a week for six months.

Soon, the scientists and lab workers were ready to riot.

"They were saying, We’re trying to deliver new compounds and develop new drugs, and we have to spend all our time learning these new systems," recalls Hauck, who heard similar reactions throughout the newly merged organization. "It was a lot of change to drop on people while expecting them to continue to deliver." After all, these new technologies were supposed to improve productivity, not impede it.

That’s when Hauck decided to educate himself and his staff about managing change. "In the end," he says, "integration comes down to nothing more than change management."

Divided They Fail

Throughout the $418 billion pharmaceutical industry, money-making drugs such as Eli Lilly’s Prozac, Aventis’s Allegra and Pfizer’s Zoloft are going off patent, meaning the huge profits they’ve been generating will diminish. At the same time, masses of new data are piling up from the decoding of the human genome. In order to make sense of all this information and reduce the time and money it takes to bring drugs to market, pharmaceutical companies are introducing new technologies ranging from the automated screening of potential compounds by the thousands to software that speeds the process of synthesizing and then testing the most promising chemical compounds. But exploiting the full potential of these new tools requires a fundamental shift in the way Big Pharma R&D works.

 

 

 

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