Learning from the Little Guy

More and more pharma titans are planting small R&D divisions in biotech hotspots, hoping a startup-like environment will provide fertile ground for innovation.

Boston/Cambridge, San Diego, San Francisco, and Research Triangle Park, NC, - already home to top universities and biotech firms - give companies like Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, Abbott, and Wyeth easy access to talent and cutting-edge collaboration.

"The climate here in Cambridge is innovative, it's entrepreneurial-for the US and the world-this is where the life sciences are happening," says Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) spokesman Jeff Lockwood. NIBR, which will eventually employ roughly 1,000 scientists, was established with the goal of creating a "culture of science," with researchers focusing on understanding mechanism of action rather than a drug's downstream effects, Lockwood explains. The Cambridge facility also acts as headquarters for a global network of similarly tasked research centers.

Larger firms are most definitely "trying to engender that entrepreneurial spirit by co-locating with the universities like Harvard and MIT," according to Roger Edwards, director of life sciences and the biosystems unit of Cambridge, Mass.-based pharmaceutical consulting firm TIAX.

"I think the attraction for the scientist is that they get state-of-the-art tools to work with that are hard to come by in other locations," Edwards adds. "And you get the intellectual and collegial interactions that are easier to come by in these kinds of hubs."

NIBR's two buildings include 70,000 m² of laboratory space built to foster collaboration and collegiality among scientists within and across teams and divisions, Lockwood says. Work stations are located next to lab benches, spaces are open with glass walls or no walls, and break areas are centrally located and designed to be comfortable and welcoming. "Typically, scientists tend to stick to their knitting and we wanted to have the space as open as possible," he explains. "That type of informal interaction a lot of times leads to exciting ideas."

This openness extends to the Cambridge community at large; NIBR hosts a weekly luncheon seminar where scientists and others from outside the company are invited to hear local experts talk about their work.

AstraZeneca fosters the entrepreneurial spirit at its 400-employee R&D center in Waltham, Mass., just outside of Boston, says R&D recruitment manager Kathleen Richards. "Scientists are encouraged to come up with ideas to launch new drug discovery programs and to build both business and scientific collaborations externally," says Richards, who notes that the company's home base in Wilmington, Del., operates in a "more traditional corporate way."

Creating a real entrepreneurial environment can be a "tough thing" for a big company, says Tom Bramswig, president of the Pleasantville, NY-based recruiting firm Pharmaceutical Careers. "If they create a smaller entity within itself doing more of the basic R&D, they can successfully create that atmosphere."

Smaller firms have a natural advantage when it comes to offering an entrepreneurial spirit, he adds, because they "are actually living it."

Either way, it's a boon for scientists when Big Pharma opens R&D centers in biotech meccas, Bramswig points out. "No one wants to go to a one-horse town. There's a lot of biotechs in Cambridge, so ultimately if it doesn't work out, there's other opportunities."

-- Edward Winnick