About...
Martin Joseph
Martin Joseph is an Associate of Nine-TZ Healthcare Ventures and Managing Director of UK-based Rivershill Consultancy Ltd., specialising in business forecasting, planning and decision-making.
Martin was formerly Head of Information Management and Forecasting at AstraZeneca where he was responsible for the global forecasting business processes and systems. He was also responsible for the provision of the information required to support the AstraZeneca Global Supply Chain Teams. Martin worked for the former Zeneca and its forerunner, ICI, for over 34 years.
Previously in his career, he was Head of Decision Support and held various senior roles in change management, international marketing, project management and R&D.
Martin has chaired and is a regular speaker at international cross-industry conferences on forecasting and supply chain planning. He is a member of the Advisory Boards for the Institute of Business Forecasting and Eyeforpharma.
Introduction
Despite allocating an increasing proportion of sales revenue to research and development the pharmaceutical industry has largely failed to increase the average annual number of new drug introductions. Furthermore, development attrition rates have changed little over the last 25 years. If we make assumptions that the average attrition rate for biologics is somewhat lower than for traditional small molecules, we might conclude that the attrition rate for the latter has in fact worsened. Why is this?
Whilst companies have improved their ability to deliver the individual stages of development, increasing regulatory and health economic requirements have absorbed and negated these benefits.
We constantly hear companies claiming to have improved their selection process for development candidates: There is little evidence that this has been achieved. Assuming the industry does not significantly improve its ability to select individual development candidates from research what can be done to improve output?
In this article, I discuss why traditional incentives applied through the research & development process do not encourage early project termination and often do not improve the cumulative project risk profile. Instead of nurturing projects that might succeed, I propose that we look for every opportunity to kill them as early as possible, so that only the strong survive.