Pfizer Inc chief executive officer Jeffrey Kindler said his company can boost its late-stage experimental medicines by 50 percent next year as it implements strategies to make drug development more efficient.
Kindler, now in his second year as CEO of the world’s biggest drugmaker, has already eliminated jobs and factories to cut about US$2 billion in costs. He is now turning to Pfizer’s research laboratories and drug development units to see how the company can boost productivity.
“There is absolutely a need to be efficient across the industry in general and Pfizer is no exception,” Kindler said in an interview aired yesterday on Bloomberg television.
“We have looked at every program, every compound and made decisions to exit where we don’t see promise and to reinvest those savings,” he said.
Kindler is bracing New York-based Pfizer for generic competition in 2011 to its Lipitor cholesterol pill, the world’s top-selling drug with US$12.7 billion in sales last year. The drugmaker doesn’t have enough new products in development to replace the losses from Lipitor so Kindler is looking to trim expenses and squeeze more profit from existing products.
He’s also embarking on a strategy to make the pharmaceutical giant more nimble and “entrepreneurial,” by creating smaller units that “can move faster,” he said. Pfizer also is focusing on partnerships and alliances with biotechnology companies and smaller drugmakers.
Growth in the pharmaceutical industry is slowing, Kindler said in the interview. One way to be more efficient is to dismantle the “monolithic structure” of pharmaceutical research and development.
“I think growth rates are not going to be top-line double digit in the industry,” he said. “The problem of productivity in the industry is a significant one.”
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