FIND IT, FILE IT, FLOG IT: PHARMA’S CRIPPLING ADDICTION AND HOW TO CURE IT
Chapter 5: Pharma Receives a SICCI-NING Diagnosis
Chapter 5: Pharma Receives a SICCI-NING Diagnosis
The story so far is that of an industry riddled with conflicting messages about its state of well-being. After a comfortable lifestyle based on serendipitous discoveries and marketing muscle, Big Pharma has worrying signs that things are not what they should be. Life has become far more difficult than ever. Offers of help from all around are muddled and confused. How can the industry get to the bottom of things?
We will now dig into the summary for the Pharma industry to find out exactly what effect this has had, beginning with an excerpt from the final chapter of my previous book, Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry: Delivering Patient Value for Pharmaceuticals and Biologics” to set the tone.
“The Pharmaceutical industry has always been fragmented, with no single company ever holding more than a single-digit market share. This fragmentation grew into full disconnectedness when Pharmaceutical companies began to retrench into the opposite ends of the business: discovery research and marketing. In metaphorical terms, the brain kept its head and legs and threw away its body, with arms attached. The body is now in no-man’s land, making do as best it can with little meaningful contact with its previous fellow body parts. The head and legs are Pharmaceutical companies spearheading the drive to discover drugs to cure unmet medical needs and build a market for them. The disconnected body parts, the engine room of clinical and nonclinical development, manufacture, and supply, are sitting in the land of outsourced services. In this land it is survival of the fittest; and the fittest know how to manage commercial contracts for maximum benefit. There is also more to this disconnectedness. The marketing part of the head is not engaged with patients. The discovery research part of the head has now entered the disconnection game by outsourcing its work to small and medium-sized companies, known as biotech or virtual drug developers. These are typically companies with insufficient critical mass to undertake the vital early-stage work required for modernization, discussed in earlier chapters.”
In that book, I coined the term SICCI to describe the condition this lifestyle has created. SICCI stands for Serendipity Induced Chronic-disconnectedness, associated with Change Inertia. It’s a dreadful pun, I know, but it conveys a serious message.