One of the benefits of blogging is that there is no shortage of smart people who are also blogging. This creates a wealth of material for my own blogging and thinking.
Such is the case of Derek Lowe's most recent post, The Globalization of Med Chem. He discusses the trend involving the emergence of contract medicinal chemistry "shops" which can replace some (all?) of the internal medicinal chemistry activities found in any pharmaceutical company or contract research organization. Quote:
That trend has been reaching its logical conclusion recently, with the entry of suppliers from India and China. Man, are these guys cheap. In many cases, they can underbid pretty much anyone here in the US, and they often do very good work (after all, there's plenty of well-trained scientific labor coming from both of those countries.)
It's gotten to the point that I don't see how the standard make-your-compounds-sir? contract houses are going to stay in business over here. Many of them have already been branching out, looking for some unusual type of chemistry to specialize in (nasty halogenations, high-pressure reactions) or getting into FDA-quality manufacturing for clinical trials, which is something that the Indian and Chinese companies can't yet provide - I think.
We see it in industry after industry, where competition based on geography and common language is shifting to one based on cost, speed, and mimicry. Mimicry? Think about how the Japanese economy emerged in the 70s, from imitation (e.g., the same VCRs and TVs as made in the US, only cheaper) to innovation (Sony Playstation, Lexus, Infiniti), and thus premium pricing. To quote Derek again:
Perhaps it would do us all good, here in the US-based Big Pharma labs, to find some useful med-chem skills that would be harder to outsource. . .
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