Is pharma R&D too complex to manage?
As management consultants who also deliver innovation, we ask ourselves:
- what does it really take to improve the effectiveness of pharmaceutical R&D?
- how are we best placed to help companies move past mergers to organic growth in value?
We think that this is through recognition of the unique set of challenges that R&D managers face.
In research, the emphasis needs to be on better decisions that learn from failure and, in development, on processes and governance for planning and delivery that combine the advantages of global scale and local speed and agility.
PA's 'ARBITER' approach (Architecture for Reliable Business Improvement and Technology Evaluation in Research) has harnessed a combination of AI and statistical approaches to business improvement that PA has already successfully deployed for insurance claims assessment.
We think that for the pharma sector this could typically increase the value of R&D outputs, for given capacity, by about 10%, or more for companies that are a long way from best practice in their decision-making.
Interview with Nick Hughes, Head of PA’s new Life Sciences and Healthcare Group
Over the years, PA has carried out a wide variety of work for clients in life sciences and healthcare. The advent of this new group means that we are consolidating our industry expertise into a center of excellence.
As well as providing consultancy to those sectors, the new group will offer clients a conduit for accessing relevant capabilities and best-of-breed solutions right across PA’s 30-plus areas of business.
As a further demonstration of our commitment to these markets, we have invested significantly in IP over the past year. Some fruits of our investments are already to be seen in ARBITER, an approach to better decision-making in discovery, and in our product authentication offering.
Risk in the pharmaceutical supply chain - for suppliers and consumers
In 2001, an estimated 192,000 people died in China alone as a result of taking counterfeit medicines, either directly through the toxins in the fake drugs or because their disease was left untreated by ineffective medicines. In the US, the FDA has seen an increase in its counterfeit drug investigations to over 20 cases per year since 2000, up from an average of five per year in the late 1990s.
The fake medicines discovered in the US supply chain during 2003 have highlighted the fact that pharmaceutical counterfeiting is a global issue, not just limited to developing countries.
Pharmaceutical companies lose ownership and therefore control over their products long before these reach the end-customer, the patient. This leaves companies open to many forms of pharmaceutical fraud, of which counterfeiting is only one example; others include diversion, illegal imports, and stolen product.
PA Consulting Group has developed a set of technologies to enhance the pharmaceutical distribution channel, enabling control and eliminating risk. In addition to patient safety, these technologies will also provide opportunities in other strategic areas, such as additional patient services, demand management and regulatory compliance. Management of the supply chain can now offer a truly strategic role within the pharmaceutical industry.
Effective portfolio management: summary from PA’s 2nd Annual Portfolio Management Seminar
At this seminar in September 2003, executives from leading European life science companies discussed some of the main issues facing the industry. This article focuses on key findings from the seminar: challenges and success factors in balancing the portfolio and how to ensure portfolio management decisions are implemented.
Key issues covered include:
- why is a balanced portfolio so difficult to achieve?
- what are the prerequisites for achieving balance?
- how can we make portfolio management decisions stick?
