Be Fast or Be Gone by Andreas Scherer

Author:Andreas Scherer [Scherer, Andreas]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Publisher: ProChain Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10: The Interviews

Graham wasn’t kidding when he said that Mike would receive any support he needed. Mike scheduled meetings with Stephen and all his direct reports. He’d never seen calendars cleared so quickly. Graham had apparently made it very clear to everyone that Mike’s plan was top priority for everyone. No exceptions.

Mike was also given his first good look at Altus Labs’ global R&D portfolio metrics. The numbers were not pretty. The metrics confirmed what Charlene had told him months ago: Only forty percent of their major milestones were met. The company had a decade-long track record of missing dates. Things had actually gotten increasingly bad over the years. Nevertheless, everyone at the company swore that missing a milestone date was a big deal. People lost their bonuses over it, after all. Regardless of the repercussions, Altus Labs’ projects often ran late, that much was clear. The success of their flagship drugs must have cushioned them from their own inefficiencies for years.

Mike was looking forward to an in-depth interview with Stephen, who had been running Altus Labs R&D for the last three years. He’d started to work for the company immediately after finishing his M.D./Ph.D. Program. He was an excellent physician but thought that life as a doctor in the Boston suburbs, where he lived at the time, would be less exciting than a corporate research career. Over the years he had developed a great reputation as a researcher and had been involved in a number of successful drug launches. Of everyone at Altus Labs, he was the best-equipped to give Mike a real sense of what the pipeline really looked like and how severe Altus Labs’ problems really were.

Sitting in the ever-popular Starbucks in Building One, now cheerfully decorated for the approach of Christmas, Stephen gave Mike a quick briefing on Altus’s portfolio of drugs. “Our portfolio is significant compared to our direct competitors’. Altus Labs has about one hundred and fifteen drugs in Phase I and II. We also have about thirty-two molecules in Phase III. There are a number of Phase IV studies in progress for drugs that are already on the market. With those studies we’re trying to find and confirm additional uses or ‘indications’ for particular drugs. Sometimes a medication that’s prescribed for cholesterol, say, can have useful effects on stress or on heart problems. Overall, we have about fifteen thousand people working in R&D. About a third of Altus’s workforce is in my department.”

One hundred and fifteen drugs in early development seemed almost unmanageably high to Mike. He knew that Altus was very proud of the breadth of its early-stage pipeline. But he also knew that people within the company had told him that they were assigned to so many of these early stage projects that they didn’t know where to begin with the work.

“How did Altus Labs end up with such a sizeable early-stage portfolio?”

Stephen paused and took a sip of coffee before he answered the question. Mike could tell he was preparing to answer very carefully and very diplomatically.

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