The Gilman Test
Over dinner the other night, a very experienced Pharmaceutical Industry executive asked me one of those awkward questions people reserve for the second bottle of wine.
“Why is drug discovery productivity so low when so much is spent on new technology like combi-chem, High Throughput Screening, protein structure determination, etcetera, etcetera?”
I said that I didn’t know, because the scientists I meet in Pharma companies are still the clever hard-working, high integrity people they always were. I said I thought that the size and complexity of large organisations and management obsessed with “process change” and “work smarter” initiatives that get people working on things other than drug discovery was ultimately a sign of weakness and was probably part of the problem.
I spent several (wasted) years of my life actively engaged in this kind of large company “strategic change initiative” which meant I was permanently on planes heading to window-less rooms in bland hotels where a group of us middle rank managers would “brainstorm” and “envision” the future, led by some charming facilitator with post-it pads and flip charts, organising us into break-out groups and workshops. It was all very exciting to start with. It felt like being part of the chosen ones, changing the future. It took me a few rounds of this to realise that the organisation was in love with the change process, not the change itself. It got to the point where I could keep the slide pack from one change initiative and recycle them in the next. My contacts in the industry tell me that this obsession with process change continues. I offered to lend them my slide packs from 10 years ago, but I think the jargon needs updating.
I quit when I couldn’t face the thought of another “brown paper brainstorming”. I still have an allergic reaction to flip charts and post-it’s.
Mostly though, I quit because I didn’t think what I was doing passed the Gilman Test.
The Gilman Test is actually a test for Grignard reagents, but I am thinking of a test devised by a former colleague, Dave Gilman, who sadly passed away a few years ago. Dave was a classic medicinal chemist who worked for ICI/Zeneca Pharmaceuticals for 30 plus years from its very early days to the 90’s when he was heavily involved in setting up computer-aided drug design facilities. When he retired he gave an eloquent and very funny retirement speech in which he said that although he had enjoyed his career, he regretted that he had never worked on a successful drug discovery project. He said that he begrudged all the time he had spent on things that weren’t directly concerned with inventing a new drug. That’s where the Gilman Test came from. He said, “When you come into work in the morning, just ask yourself if what you are going to do today will help invent a new drug? That’s the Gilman test, and if what you are doing doesn’t pass you should do stop and do something that does, because that is the only reason we are here”
So that’s the Gilman Test. My guess is that 75% of the work done in large Pharma doesn’t pass, and that’s one of the reasons the industry is spending more, but delivering less.
Comments
Dave,
Your Gilman Test applies to many areas, including producing comp chem software. Often seemed as if at most 25% of a person’s urgent tasks had direct relevance to anything but bureaucratic calls to have meetings and produce documents. Spotting that 25% well, and doing it well, was key!
Another often hypothesized issue with productivity of drug discovery is simply that few people are directly incented to discover a drug. If you are rewarded for making lots of chemicals, or screening lots of chemicals, or even for getting a low IC50 in a primary assay, the alignment of your short term tasks and rewards with future corporate rewards a decade from now is not so clear. Optimizing your part of the production line works well for automobiles, but maybe less well for drug discovery.
My own limited exposure says that many if not most drugs appear to hit multiple targets in multiple tissues. It may be that as it matures we’ll see Systems Biology, both wet labs and computational biology, reach a point where it is realistic to design chemicals with specific -omic / phenomic objectives, and that these will turn out more often survive to be drug candidates.
Completely agree. Organisations require maintainance. The larger and more complex, the greater the overhead. I think if you graphed people’s intra-company relationship networks against the number in the organisation it would be some kind of power law and each connection requires some effort.
One experience related to this…from my time at a Fortune 500 company
At one meeting about “processes for waste control” I was handed a map of my lab and some colored sticky circles. I was to stick the colored stickers on the map indicating the various types of waste receptacles. Blue bins for recyclables, clack for general trash, metal cans for glassware etc. I asked why..the answer was to track the volume of trash leaving the lab. Hmmm..how does the position of a trash can equate to the volume of trash? So, as I am prone to do, I challenged the process and asked what if I was to MOVE one of the bins? Well, that would require that I walk across the road to the building that “houses the lab layout documentation supporting trash mobility” (Ok..I am paraphrasing) and INFORM them I had moved the bin. I asked what constituted a “move”? 12″? 24″? I then explained an additional concern about trash…why were we separating general trash from recyclables for the janitors to pick up both cans and throw them both into one container? And on..and on..and on. At a table of 7 people I stayed vocal and finally said that i didn’t get “WHY?” we were to do this and to ask the organizer to visit with our management team and explain WHY. The following week we were informed the process had been “redesigned” and we were not asked to participate. Hmmm. That was ONE adventure of many.
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At one stage my Section was reorganised into a new Global Department, which was Ok by me although as was usual with these things it put all kinds of urgent things on hold. So I was eager and ready for the first management team meeting where I could find out important things (at least to me) such as can we buy the new NMR, or hire a couple more people and so on. The meeting was actually run by two “HR Facilitators”, rather then the new VP and they spent a lot of time coaching us on how to develop our mission statement so that we could gain stakeholder buy-in. After nearly 2 days of this we ended up with some long-winded statement which I don’t remember, but was along the lines of
It was about 20 lines long. I’d been getting itchy for a while but when the HR guy (who had clearly been on the wrong end of sense of humour transplant) stood up front to exhort us to go out and “sell the vision” to “our people” I refused. This got him quite upset. “So what will you do tomorrow when you bump into someone in the corridor and they ask what you have been doing for the last 2 days?”
“I’d tell them to f*** off and mind their own business”, I said
As you said Tony, many more …
The strange thing is that when you are inside one of these mega-companies, it all seems sort of normal. It’s only later that you see how much of the activity is fundamentally dysfunctional.
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