Fresh Start 2002: Roche's New Scientific Method

Four years ago, Holly Hilton was training to be a fruit-fly and plant geneticist. She had completed her PhD at Rutgers in 1996, and she had an academic career in store. But she was itching for excitement. A revolution was taking shape in human genomics, and her worry was, "I'm missing it."

Just then, the Roche Group was having its own epiphany. For years, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant pitted veteran scientific teams against one another. That proud, stubborn culture helped Roche develop blockbuster drugs such as Valium and Librium. But it wasn't working anymore. For Roche to move forward, the company needed to wipe away its gladiator mentality and replace it with a warmer style of teamwork -- especially in the chaotic, booming new field of genomics.

So Roche began running ads in the back pages of Science magazine, looking for a new breed of researcher. It wasn't essential to have a glittering, 20-year résumé. Roche wanted people who were starting out, who could reinvent themselves as job opportunities changed. When Hilton saw one of those ads, she sent in her résumé and told herself, "I want that job."

Today, Hilton is on the front lines of Roche's push into the genomics era. She runs a bustling lab at Roche's U.S. pharmaceuticals headquarters in Nutley, New Jersey. In a workspace the size of a galley kitchen, she and three assistants load up $100,000 machines with tiny samples of cryogenically preserved tissue. Each time the machines whiz into action, researchers pry out more secrets of the samples' DNA.

For Roche, these are thrilling times. Week by week, new breakthroughs in genomics and molecular biology are upending the way it hunts for new drugs. It's now possible to pursue new drug targets with a speed and gusto that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It's possible to size up toxicity risks earlier than ever. And it's becoming possible to match up drugs with the people who are best suited for them, ushering in an era of customized medicines.

But the genomics revolution is incredibly jarring as well. In fact, reckoning with its impact demands a fresh start in the fundamentals of innovation and R&D. Old ways of managing projects don't make sense. Roche can now run 1 million genomics experiments a day, churning out enough data to overwhelm every computer it owns. Research teams that once spent years looking for a single good idea now face hundreds or even thousands of candidates. Without a clear way to handle all of this information, it's possible to drown in the data.

"There's a huge amount of ignorance and hype," warns Jonathan Knowles, Roche's global head of research. Yes, knowing the human genome in detail can generate thousands of exciting possibilities for new-drug development. "But it costs $50 million or more to find out if each one is viable," he explains. "And most of them don't pan out. Getting a new drug all the way through the pipeline is a tremendously complicated process. Before we can commit to those kinds of projects, we need to know much more about the odds for each one."

Still, at the highest levels of Roche, there is real excitement about what lies ahead. At a media briefing last August, Roche Group chairman and CEO Franz Humer declared, "Look at this revolution of genetics, genomics, and proteomics. It's becoming ever clearer that we will be able to identify early the predisposition of people to disease -- and to monitor and treat them more effectively. We'll develop markers for cancer. That will lead to better test kits and to new pharmaceuticals."

So what is the right way to reconfigure a company when breakthrough technology shows up on its doorstep? Step inside Roche's U.S. pharmaceuticals headquarters, and you'll see how that adjustment is taking place. It begins with something as basic -- and hard -- as embracing the excitement of having way too much data, too fast. It goes on to include new thinking about the best ways to build teams, hire people, and create a culture where failure is all right, as long as you fail fast. The only way to embrace a technological revolution, Roche has discovered, is to unleash an organizational revolution.

Finally, Roche is nudging this upheaval systematically, one piece at a time. Some parts of the company, such as basic research, have been utterly transformed by genomics. Other areas, such as animal studies and patient trials of experimental medicines, are feeling the first stirrings of new techniques. Not everything needs to be ripped up and rebuilt at once. Over time, though, every aspect of health care will be transformed.