The Thrill of Defeat

Nancy Hutson is a whip-smart, outspoken 55-year-old biologist who joined Pfizer Inc. as a research scientist in 1981. She spent the next 15 years in drug discovery at Groton Laboratories, and put 35 medicines into development at a total cost of billions. Despite all that time and money, not a single one of Hutson's new-drug prospects ever made it to market. Nothing that she touched, in other words, was a success.

So has Hutson found another line of work? Is she, perhaps, a biology teacher? Or maybe a consultant, that ultimate refuge for someone with a record of relentless commercial failure? Hardly. Since 2000, Hutson has been senior vice president of global research and development at Pfizer and the director of Groton Labs, the largest drug-discovery facility on earth. And before that, she held a series of increasingly important management posts at Pfizer's Central Research Division.

Hutson's ascent in the face of what would be, by the standards of most other industries, a catastrophic series of disappointments, tells you a lot about the rarefied world of pharmaceutical R&D. Drug discovery is a costly slog in which hundreds of scientists screen tens of thousands of chemicals against specific disease targets. After a remorseless round of testing, most of those compounds will prove to be unstable, unsafe, or otherwise unsuitable for human use. Pfizer spends $152 million a week funding 479 early-stage, preclinical discovery projects; 96% of those efforts will ultimately bomb. In today's show-me-the-money corporate world, drug labs like Groton may be unique: Because drug-development projects are parsed out over years and sometimes even decades, and because their rate of attrition is so horrendous, these labs are prisms through which conventional notions of success and failure get stretched and squeezed into strange new shapes. They're also a world in which many of the typical emotional incentives for coming into work each day--the chance to be part of a winning team, to launch a hit new product, to beat a sales target--simply don't apply.

Any business that's developing new products or tackling new markets--any business worth its salt, in other words--faces setbacks; they are the price of ambition. And we're all exhorted to dare to fail. Still, the assumption is that our defeats will be only occasional setbacks--instructional blemishes on our otherwise untainted records of success.

Pfizer's drug-development efforts are failure at its most extreme, and they demand persistence at its most heroic. Want to know how to motivate people to take on almost impossible odds, and then how to lead them through disappointment and loss? Ask Hutson. Drug discovery's high-risk, high-reward model means that she must steel both herself and her talented and ambitious researchers for lifetimes of chronic futility. "As leaders, a big part of our task is to keep the best and brightest minds in research connected to the mission," she says. "At the same time, we have to help them understand that only a tiny minority of them--over their entire careers--will ever touch a winning drug." Within Pfizer, in fact, the scientists who have actually invented a successful compound are viewed as near-mythic figures because there are so few of them. And for the rest? "We have to lead them through failure," Hutson says.

Make no mistake: Groton Labs isn't some academic hothouse where a few eggheads are allowed to toil fruitlessly forever. This is a vast commercial enterprise, and one on which Pfizer depends for much of its future success. More than 4,000 people work on this sprawling campus built on what was once a submarine shipyard in southeastern Connecticut. In Building 220, a massive complex of glass and steel, more than 750 chemists, biologists, and drug-metabolism specialists take on an endeavor that's among the most ambitious of human efforts--to invent medicines that will stop cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and other chronic, long-term diseases. Pfizer might well have the biggest R&D operations of any company in the world. Working out of 16 facilities stretching from California to France and on to Japan, its army of 13,000 research scientists is more than four times the size of IBM's R&D staff. Pfizer's research budget of $7.9 billion is nearly five times that of the world's largest consumer-products company, Procter & Gamble.

And despite the odds, Groton Labs has had a long and storied history. It has previously produced three blockbuster drugs: Feldene, Zoloft, and Zithromax. What's more, it is well positioned for the future: Four vaults, hidden behind a series of alarmed doors in Building 118, contain a priceless armamentarium of 600,000 compounds invented at Groton. Pfizer hopes that at least one of those substances might prove to be the building block for the next Viagra or Lipitor.