Amgen's 'modality' play in Tularik

Over the past few years, Amgen Inc.'s R&D efforts have been weighted toward the D side. The investment has paid off, as AMGN has received FDA approval for three new drugs since the second half of 2001. As Aranesp, Neulasta and Kineret moved to market, it was becoming clear that AMGN's research needed to be stepped up. The company had already made clear that it wanted to expand its discovery efforts from proteins to other types of therapeutics, and for the past few years AMGN has said it will need to succeed at adding small molecule products to its protein base (see BioCentury, Feb. 22, 2000).

"When I arrived at Amgen in 2001, I looked through all the research projects and focused the attention on a subset of these - the goal was to get them into the clinic," said Executive Vice President of R&D Roger Perlmutter. "Over the past three years we have put more compounds into the clinic than in the previous decade. But in order to do that, we had to suspend a lot of discovery work in order to get the projects over the finish line. This led to the need to rebuild our discovery engine."...