EXCLUSIVE LIFE SCIENCE FEATURE
leaders
LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM NOVEMBER 2014
24
GLAXOSMITHKLINE
—
REFOCUSING,
RESHAPING
ONCOLOGY
R&D;
By
W.
Koberstein
oon after my first conversa-
tions with GlaxoSmithKline
about interviewing its head of
pharma R&D;, the news hit. In a
mega-swap of product lines
with another global pharma giant, GSK
gave up its entire commercial oncology
portfolio to Novartis in exchange for the
Swiss company's vaccine line; at the same
time, the two companies combined their
consumer health units into a single busi-
ness with GSK as the majority owner.
Oncology was no small part of its drug
division at the time, accounting for about
4 percent (about $1.5 billion) of phar-
maceutical revenues before the Novartis
deal.
Early on, it took reading past the head-
lines to grasp GSK's full intentions.
Essentially the company is refocusing its
oncology R&D;, all the while continuing to
reshape the entire pharma R&D; organiza-
tion. The leader in charge of the transi-
tion is Dr. Patrick Vallance, president of
Pharmaceuticals R&D.; A former academic
researcher, Vallance headed drug discov-
ery before taking on the entire pharma
R&D; unit in 2012.
Thus he has witnessed the good, bad,
and the less-than-pretty results coming
from the organization during his eight
years with the company. After a compara-
tive dry spell, GSK staged a recovery in
drug development in recent years, with
six new drugs entering the market since
2012.
The company's bonus program for dis-
covery scientists, giving a small incentive
at proof-of-concept and a bigger payment
at approval, turned out to be a good sur-
rogate marker for the new-drug surge.
"Medicines can fail at any stage, so we
didn't want to give big rewards at the end
of Phase 2a; we wanted to signal there
was a big reward to be given at that point,
which would come when the medicine
becomes a medicine, and we paid up on
that promise with the product approvals,"
says Vallance.
Those successes, however, have not
stopped the R&D; transformation already
under way — and, in fact, the new prod-
ucts are more reflective of the company's
past than predictive of its future direc-
S
GLAXOSMITHKLINE
REFOCUSING, RESHAPING ONCOLOGY R&D;
W A Y N E K O B E R S T E I N
Executive Editor