Opportunity PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

Some aspects of synthetic chemistry have changed in response to environmental needs. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry the classical methods produce, on the average, about nine times as much disposable waste as desired product. This has led to the demand for procedures that have atom efficiency, in which all the atoms of the reacting compounds appear in the product. Thus (as discussed earlier) the demand for atom economy offers additional opportunities for creative invention of transformations. 

With regard to application in the pharmaceutical industry, palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions offer the opportunity of shorter and more selective routes for a number of currently marketed and future drugs. Therefore, it is not surprising that since the early 1990s more and more palladium-catalyzed reactions are transferred from academic protocols to the industrial context (Beller et al. 2001 Beller and Zapf 2002 de Vries 2001). Selected examples of processes that are used nowadays or have been used in the pharmaceutical industry are shown in Scheme 3. In order to see more realizations of this type of chemistry, more active and productive palladium catalysts have to be developed because of the high price of palladium and most often the ligand system. 

Progress in instrumentation has considerably improved the sensitivity of fluorescence detection. Advanced fluorescence microscopy techniques allow detection at single molecule level, which opens up new opportunities for the development of fluorescence-based methods or assays in material sciences, biotechnology and in the pharmaceutical industry. 

An example from another arena often helps people in the pharmaceutical industry understand the concepts around dynamic modeling and risk assessment incorporating uncertainty. The petroleum industry has used these approaches for years to help evaluate the risks and rewards associated with a portfolio of investment opportunities. At a 10,000 ft view, the structure inherent in the petroleum industry can be depicted as shown in Figure 35.11. 

The pharmaceutical industry, together with the advances in gene therapy and understanding of mechanisms of causes of diseases, and the research results from the Human Genome Project have opened up a plethora of opportunities and made possible the development and use of drugs specifically targeting the sites where diseases are caused. 

Meetings and conferences undoubtedly perform a dual purpose, being both promotional in nature as well as permitting the interchange of imbiased scientific information. If pharmaceutical companies did not provide substantial sponsorship to such meetings at both national and international level, such meetings would not occur. Elowever, critics of pharmaceutical industry sponsorship tend to see only the opportunities for promotion provided by such events. As with all such... 

On this point, Grabowski and Vernon (1990,1994) estimate rates of return from investment in pharmaceutical research and development, and report values slightly higher than the associated cost of capital. In their latter study they conclude the estimated mean return on pharmaceutical industry new chemical entity (NCE) introductions forthe first half ofthe 1980s was 11.1% compared with the estimated (real) cost of capital of 10.5% over the same period (p. 404). This finding also suggests that one is unlikely to find major unexploited opportunities. Still, without determining a social optimum, one cannot make firm conclusions about the sufficiency of resources directed toward these activities. 

The declining economic efficiency of drug development led the FDA to try to identify root causes and potential solutions to this problem in its Critical Path Initiative, in which pharmacogenomics was recognized as one of the technologies that will lead to iimova-tion in the pharmaceutical industry (6). This has been followed by several advisories to industry, such as an opportunity for safe-harbor voluntary submission of genomic data by sponsors (50) and a series of collaborative workshops (7). 

---