Rolling with the Punches

This week’s issue is C&EN’s annual pharmaceutical issue, timed to coincide with the CPhI pharmaceutical ingredients conference, which will be held next week in Madrid. The issue contains four stories that relate directly to pharmaceuticals and the fine and custom chemical manufacturers that play a central role in the pharmaceutical business (see pages 23, 27, 69, and 85).

The lead Business Department story by Senior Editor Rick Mullin looks at the major changes occurring among European fine and custom chemical manufacturers, which, Mullin writes, “have spent the past five years rolling with the punches.”

“Competition from Asia, long threatened, is now a reality,” Mullin writes. “The business has also shifted significantly away from large pharmaceutical firms to emerging drug companies, biopharmaceutical firms, and virtual companies whose needs are different and whose prospects, generally, can only be called iffy. With that shift, the business has also tipped heavily toward the U.S., the center of the world’s biopharmaceutical industry, where the weak dollar has increased pressure for players in Europe—the traditional home of pharmaceutical fine chemicals.”

Most of the firms Mullin profiles have responded fairly adroitly to the shift in customers. Hovione CEO Guy Villax (who is a member of C&EN’s Advisory Board) told Mullin that working with big pharma “was a great business to be in because you had little risk,” with the client developing the process and the contractor simply running it. “That wonderful, low-risk business is gone,” Villax says. “Now, you have to start at early phase; you have to do a lot of process development. You have to put up with a high percentage of failures. It’s much tougher.”

Tougher, but manageable for nimble firms. Hovione, Degussa, Avecia, Siegfried, Rhodia, and others claim to have successfully realigned themselves in response to the changing business climate. Less easily managed is the rising competition from fine and custom manufacturers in China and India, Mullin’s sources told him.

This week’s cover stories by Senior Correspondent Ann Thayer offer a comprehensive examination of the maddeningly difficult worldwide challenge of malaria, a disease that afflicts hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor, and causes more than a million deaths per year. In the first story, Thayer looks at efforts to develop new antimalarial drugs that are needed to ensure that effective and affordable treatments continue to be available and are not lost to parasite resistance. In the second, she reports on efforts to prevent malaria through development of a successful vaccine, an effort that has taken decades and is only now showing some hints of progress.

There are two major obstacles to successfully tackling malaria. The life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite that causes the disease is complex. And because most of the people affected by malaria are desperately poor, there is not much business incentive for developing drugs and vaccines against it.

That said, Thayer describes numerous partnerships among government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and pharmaceutical companies working on malaria. Thayer quotes Federico Gomez de las Heras, director of GlaxoSmithKline’s Diseases of the Developing World Drug Discovery unit: “In the diseases of the developing world, the problems are so big that collaboration—putting together all the different capabilities of industry, government, academia, and [public-private partnerships]—is necessary.”

I can’t help ending this editorial on a personal note. Last Wednesday night, I attended a U2 concert in Washington, D.C. At one point in the concert, Bono, who had had lunch earlier in the day with President George W. Bush, asked God to inspire scientists to find cures for diseases like malaria and AIDS, thanked the U.S. for its generous donations of AIDS drugs to African nations, and dedicated the song “Miracle Drug” to Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, who is one of the nation’s truly great physician/researchers and one of my personal heroes. I thought that was incredibly cool.

Thanks for reading.