Pfizer on track for speedy pruning, alignment of research programs post Wyeth acquisition

Pfizer on track for speedy research alignment

TRENTON, N.J. — Megamergers in the pharmaceutical industry usually take many months to sort out, but the two research directors at newly combined Pfizer Inc. and Wyeth say they’re off to a running start.

They plan within just 30 days — 60 days, tops — to announce what projects will stay in their research program and what gets cut. That’s a lot speedier than the six to nine months companies often take, and much shorter than the painful, drawn-out integrations after Pfizer bought Pharmacia Corp. in 2003 and Warner-Lambert Co. in 2000.

There’s a lot to work through, given that the new Pfizer, resulting from a $68 billion acquisition that closed Thursday, will have 18 research units, up from the 11 Pfizer had.

“We have over 600 projects in the combined pipeline of the two companies, and the vast majority are in the key areas that we want to work in: oncology, diabetes, pain and inflammation,” Martin Mackay told The Associated Press Friday.

Mackay had been head of research and development at New York-based Pfizer and now will head “pharma therapeutics” research and development. His group has 10 units focused on pills and other conventional medicines, with research in heart and metabolic diseases, cancer, pain, antibacterials, antivirals, allergy and respiratory disorders, and units working with stem cells and looking for new uses of existing drugs.

Mikael Dolsten, who had been head of research at Wyeth, now oversees “biotherapeutics” research.

Dolsten will run eight units, including ones focused on vaccine research, inflammation and immunology, correcting genetic defects and repairing damaged tissue. Other units will create drugs by using specific types of biotechnology, from disrupting the pathways involved in specific diseases to targeting the messages sent by RNA, the genetic material inside cells that tells them what proteins to make.

“From today, Pfizer is going to run two highly innovative research divisions,” Mackay said. “It hasn’t been tried in this way before … at this scale” in the industry.

Pfizer now has seven experimental drugs awaiting approval, 32 in final testing, nearly 50 in midstage testing and more than 50 in early human testing.

For compounds earlier in development, Pfizer plans to speed up the process when possible. That’s key, because getting an experimental drug to market often takes more than a decade, reducing the time until it faces generic competition.

Dolsten said the focus will be on high-impact medicines, in areas such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and inflammation, that will “provide real value for patients and payers.”

While Mackay and Dolsten prune their research organization, other Pfizer executives are making decisions about pruning staff and facilities, particularly where there is overlap.

The two companies have a heavy concentration of facilities from Connecticut and New York to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

“In the quad-state area, we do expect to maintain a significant presence,” Pfizer spokeswoman Joan Campion said Friday.

So far, Pfizer has decided to keep open Wyeth’s 850-employee headquarters in Madison, N.J., making it the home of “diversified health care,” which includes the consumer health and animal health businesses, nutrition products like Centrum vitamins and a business that makes gelcaps.

Likewise, Wyeth’s 3,500-employee research, marketing and administrative center in Collegeville, west of Philadelphia, will stay open. Some employees will be consolidated there from a nearby site with 1,000 employees, in finance and information technology, in Great Valley.

Because of consolidations across the company, not all those employees will keep their jobs.

A large facility in Peapack, N.J., with offices for corporate and other functions, will stay open, as will Pfizer’s global headquarters in Manhattan.

But a 300-person Pfizer office in Bridgewater, N.J., where manufacturing technology is developed, will be closed and at least some of those people moved elsewhere.

In Connecticut, where about 5,000 people work in research and back-office operations in Groton and New London, no decision has been made yet.

Nearly 20,000 job cuts are expected once the integration is complete.