Open Innovation

How to get away from Attrition – Roche’s J.J. Garaud at MipTec yesterday September 24, 2010

Like most of us,  Roche is thinking about how to boost innovaiton!

The facts are somewhat frigthening: Currently, 4500 drugs in clinical trials of which app. app. 40 gets approved. Meanwhile, R&D expenditure keeps rising, now trippeled during the last few decades.

What is Roche’s answer? Well, I was very pleased to hear how the Pharma Research and Early Development division, which Garaud leads, is resetting their strategy on several fronts:

1. Bringing Systems Biology, Modeling & Simulation, Translational Medicine and Biomarkers to the centre stage. Garaud said that these new disciplines having emerged over the last years now have to be at the centre of early R&D.  So much more knowledge and lower attrition could be expected from this – and he gave some interesting examples from Roche’s own R&D.

 Spot on. Focus on learning and understanding targets and disease biology – move away from milestone driven R&D, which does not necessarily lead to the right experimentsd being performed in due time.

2. Focus more on External Innovaiton. Bring in more fro mthe outside. Garaud clearly said that most of the innovation is out there. While I did not hear him talk about Open Innvoation, it was clear that Roche will be looking for evenb stronger external paretnering across the globe.

3. Strong collaboraiton between the Pharma and Diagnostics divisions. Roche is in a ratehr unique positions thanks to Roche Diagnostics. While co-developing diagnostic tools (another example from Roche’s oncology pipeline showed how dedicated Roche is to this approach) seems to be viable in oncology, we still have to find ways forward for such progress in other therapeutic areas.

4. Approach selection of treatment modality  from several angles. Small molecules, antibodies, RNAi, peptides, therapeutic stem cells a.o.  Garaud was clear that we will see much more coming in terms of new modalities, and gave examples of SiRNA projects and efforts around new RNA delivery systems.

All this is excellent, and may very well be the solution from Roche. I would welcome discussions on which other possible changes would help creating more and better medicines/treatments.