Roche R&D reshuffle won't impact outsourcing activity
pharmaceutical business will have no impact on any of the company's
outsourcing activities, a company spokesperson said.
"We are planning to use our own resources to handle the increased number of clinical trials being conducted," Katja Prowald, Roche's spokesperson, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
"This will create more costs and that is the reason why we are planning to increase our R&D budget."
While Prowald stressed that the new restructuring of the firm's research activities will not impact on how Roche outsources some stages of its drug development, she wouldn't reveal to what degree the drug maker was already relying on outsourcing for the research and development of new drugs.
The Swiss giant announced last Monday that it was going to revamp its R&D structure and separate it into smaller disease-specific divisions in order to get drugs on the market faster.
"We intend to introduce a new research and development model in the Pharmaceuticals Division during the course of this year," said Roche's CEO Franz Humer during a media conference held in Basel, Switzerland last Wednesday.
"This is not a cost-cutting exercise. On the contrary, our R&D spend has increased significantly in recent years, and will continue to increase in the future."
Humer said his company will create five Disease Biology Areas (DBAs) for oncology, virology, inflammation, metabolism and central nervous system, which will cover everything from drug discovery through to medical proof of concept, with oversight through to the market.
Each DBA will have its own in-house leadership team and be located at one of three Roche sites: Basel in Switzerland, Nutley in New Jersey or Palo Alto in California.
Meanwhile, Roche's new plans are somewhat at odds with some of the other large pharma companies who are increasingly cutting back on internal resources and turning to outsourcing, in a bid to cut expenses as R&D costs soar and the process becomes increasingly cumbersome.
Recent data gathered by the Financial Times Research Centre shows that on average, the top 30 pharma firms spent almost 17 per cent of sales on research last year.
The report also suggests that relying on in-house research and development only has become increasingly complex in terms of budget and resources and it is now almost unviable for companies to have control over all the aspects of drug development.
"Shifting away from over-reliance on in-house R&D makes sense, but brings new risks too," the report said.
New risks that Roche is apparently not keen to take.
