Counterintuitive -- Contrary to Intuition

“Over the next few years, the pharmaceutical business will hit a wall.

“Some of the top-selling drugs in industry history will become history as patent protections expire, allowing generics to rush in at much-lower prices. Generic competition is expected to wipe $67 billion from top companies' annual U.S. sales between 2007 and 2012 as more than three dozen drugs lose patent protection. That is roughly half of the companies' combined 2007 U.S. sales.

“At the same time, the industry's science engine has stalled. The century-old approach of finding chemicals to treat diseases is producing fewer and fewer drugs. Especially lacking are new blockbusters to replace old ones like Lipitor, Plavix and Zyprexa.

“The coming sales decline may signal the end of a once-revered way of doing business. ‘I think the industry is doomed if we don't change,’ says Sidney Taurel, chairman of Eli Lilly & Co. …

“The rise of generics wouldn't matter so much if research labs were creating a stream of new hits. But that isn't happening. During the five years from 2002 through 2006, the industry brought to market 43% fewer new chemical-based drugs than in the last five years of the 1990s, despite more than doubling research-and-development spending…

“It has never been easy to take a drug from the lab, through animal testing and into human trials. The industry estimates only one out of every 5,000 to 10,000 candidates makes it to human trials…

“But those odds seem to have worsened in recent years, prompting debate about whether the cause is government regulation, corporate structure or an excessive scientific reliance on chemicals rather than biology…

“Some say the industry's ballooning research budgets may be working against productivity. Most companies use a centralized system to allocate research money, and the growing budgets have left the decision making to too few people who are too far removed from the research.”

(“Big Pharma Faces Grim Prognosis; Industry Fails to Find New Drugs to Replace Wonders Like Lipitor.” Barbara Martinez and Jacob Goldstein. Wall Street Journal: December 6, 2007. pg. A.1)

AS UNCERTAINTY INCREASES, centralization and automation ascend; touch, feel, sense and insight decline. As discovery has been relegated to mass-produced, technology-driven search, innovation has withered.

AS IT GOES in Big Pharma, so it goes in learning everywhere. Institutionalization is a heavy-handed benefactor.