Tsinopoulos, Christos Dimitris (2003) The evolution of drug discovery strategies. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The modem pharmaceutical organisation is driven by the need to discover, develop and market innovative pharmaceutical products. Key to this mission is the process of drug discovery that involves allocating vast resources to (i) identify appropriate target diseases, (ii) discover and confirm appropriate solutions, (iii) clinically develop and legally approve the solution, for (iv) manufacture and supply of the product.

Historically the drug discovery process was led by curiosity and pure research, but today it is akin to a factory system that conducts mass volume, applied and market focused research This change in focus has also been companied by numerous advancements in science, technology and market expectations As will be shown and verified in this thesis, there is relatively little in the way of existing literature and studies that focus on drug discovery strategies, and what does exist is fragmented across a number of disciplines including technology management, chemistry, automation, marketing, knowledge management and strategy.

With this background, the aim of this thesis is to make a contribution that includes understanding and defining the concept of drug discovery as a strategy, and exploring how such strategies change through time. Within management and organisational literature, there is a body of knowledge that seeks to understand how and why organisations develop different strategies and organisational forms. This thesis adopts this evolutionary and classification paradigm to examine, define and classify the different strategies that exist to discover drugs In particular, four requirements of evolution (existence in populations, the process of variation, the process of heredity, and the process of selection) are identified and translated into a strategic management and drug discovery context to create four testable hypotheses. These are:

1. There are similar drug discovery strategies employed by different organisations to form populations whose (the population’s) size follows a concave pattern of growth and decline.

2. Within a drug discovery population, there are strategies that differ to each other in terms of their characteristics and their fitness.

3. Those characteristics of drug discovery strategies credited with successful drug discovery performance are likely to appear in future strategic configurations, while those characteristics that are not, are likely to be absent.

4 With a change in the environmental conditions those drug discovery strategies that remain, are the ones whose strategic characteristics are favoured by the environment.

To address these hypotheses a business historical study is conducted using data that investigates how the pharmaceutical industry has evolved in terms of technology, knowledge, human capital and the surrounding environment. The result is an evolutionary classification that has been constructed using the cladistic method. This classification provides a system of information, evidence and assumptions that is the basis for testing the four hypotheses. The classification also provides a framework that integrates and presents the key contributions to knowledge made by this thesis:

These include:
• The creation of a definition for drug discovery strategy
• The identification of the factors that influence the change of drug discovery strategies

The creation of an evolutionary classification that identifies and arranges different types of drug discovery strategy, and reveals the characteristics of the fittest. The validation of evolution as a process for understanding change in drug discovery strategies.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	R Medicine > RS Pharmacy and materia medica
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Drugs -- Design, Pharmaceutical chemistry , Pharmaceutical technology
Official Date:	June 2003
Dates:	Date Event June 2003 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Engineering
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	McCarthy, Ian
Extent:	353 leaves
Language:	eng

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