San Francisco Business Times -- Corey Goodman has dealt with clinical trials and tribulations. Now he’s out to change Big Pharma — and maybe even the nation’s health-care system — from the inside out.A neuroscientist, academic and entrepreneur, Goodman now heads Pfizer Inc.’s experiment in combining the power of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company with the innovation of academia and the nimbleness of a cadre of small biotechs.
It’s a high-profile effort by Pfizer to refill its long-term drug pipeline and change its drug-development culture. The Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center — BBC — is seeking out new therapies, like stem cells and RNA interference and underlying technologies.
Pfizer has centered the BBC, as it’s called, at the headquarters of Rinat Neuroscience, the South San Francisco company it bought in 2006. It is set to move the operation to San Francisco’s Mission Bay development in 2010.
But to Goodman, the mission is even greater: Turning tax dollar-funded research into a new model of doing business could save the health-care system billions of dollars and accelerate new treatments for patients.
“It’s an experiment worth doing, and I love experiments,” he said.
Good timing
Less than a year before joining Pfizer, Goodman himself was heading his own company, Renovis Inc. in South San Francisco. It had a partnership with AstraZeneca PLC on a stroke drug that had passed a Phase III trial and was scouting locations for bigger quarters as the Bay Area’s next biotech success story.
Then a second Phase III trial by AstraZeneca failed, Renovis laid off 45 of its 115 employees, and Goodman ended up shopping the company to German biotech Evotec AG in a $151.8 million stock deal.
“It came incredibly close,” the slender, 57-year-old Goodman said about Renovis’ drug.
The Evotec deal was announced Sept. 18. Little more than two weeks later, Goodman was introduced as head of the BBC and was on a whirlwind business tour with Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler.
Kindler himself has made bold moves, like pulling the plug on a poor-selling inhaled insulin drug and device Exubera, licensed from San Carlos-based Nektar Therapeutics Inc. He also shuttered longtime Pfizer R&D and manufacturing sites, demonstrating a resolve to cut costs and projects that aren’t performing up to snuff.
The same month that Pfizer quashed Exubera, Kindler hired Goodman to head the BBC — a sort of Pfizer Genentech — and Martin Mackay to head research and development. Both report directly to Kindler.
The BBC has since closed deals with CovX Research LLC of La Jolla and Coley Pharmaceutical Group in Wellesley, Mass., which is developing a cancer vaccine. In May, it cut a research funding and equity deal with Five Prime Therapeutics Inc., and in June it inked a three-year, $9.5 million drug discovery and development pact with QB3 — the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences — at the University of California, San Francisco, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.
“These are relatively small bets from a Pfizer perspective,” Goodman said.
But the deals send a message that Pfizer is reaching out to academia and small, innovative biotech companies. It must do so, Goodman said, to fix a health-care system that from benchside to bedside is broken.
“If we can do this with Pfizer, then we can do this with anyone,” Goodman said.
Driving home the point, Pfizer last month said it would move the BBC and Rinat to a yet-to-be-built, five-story building in Mission Bay by early 2010. That would put it essentially across the street from UCSF and QB3 and near Five Prime.
Goodman has been a professor at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and UCSF.
Still, not all Pfizer watchers are convinced that the BBC is the right strategy. Some say the company is pouring billions of dollars into risk-filled new areas that may not pay off for a company with a narrowing drug pipeline.
But Goodman has said biotherapeutics eventually will account for as much as 25 percent of Pfizer’s pipeline. Those large-molecule products like proteins and antibodies are more complex than smaller chemical molecules, where Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies have traditionally focused.
“I want Pfizer in the top tier of all the new biologic approaches. There are other ways to make drugs these days,” Goodman said. “Pfizer was lagging behind in those areas. We’re setting up a system so we never get behind again.”
Hybrid model
Only five years ago, such a marriage between Big Pharma, biotech and academia would have been nearly impossible. Now it is essential as pharmaceutical companies look to draw from the wells of innovation at biotech companies and academic institutions.
At the same time, many young biotech companies are hostage to the tight capital markets and are looking to ink partnerships — or more — with deep-pocketed pharmaceutical companies or other biotechs.
“If we can’t figure out a way to make this work, we’ve lost an opportunity,” Goodman said.
