Preclinical Development
"We are drug hunters. We understand that drug development is a complicated process in which new challenges appear daily. It is both a frustrating and enormously rewarding process," says Richard Robertson, senior vice president, Preclinical and Pharmaceutical Development.
At Bristol-Myers Squibb, we strive to discover potent selective drugs that we believe will benefit patients with serious and unmet medical needs. The road through the development process, however, is difficult and contains both anticipated and unexpected obstacles.
Given that fewer than one in 10 drug candidates entering development will ultimately succeed, our philosophy is to design quality into the molecules during the discovery process to increase our success rate.
In preclinical development, we attempt to understand the potential undesirable effects of candidate drugs as well as their metabolism and pharmaceutical acceptability. We then relay this information to the medicinal chemists who make the necessary structural alterations to produce drug candidates with favorable benefit/risk profiles.
As development proceeds, we sometimes uncover unexpected liabilities which must be understood and put into perspective. In our experience, conducting rigorous investigations to understand these unexpected toxicities is essential. These investigative toxicology and metabolism programs have allowed several important new drugs — which otherwise would have been dropped from development — to reach the marketplace and benefit patients.
Meeting the challenges of drug discovery and development requires team work as well as individual excellence. We pursue scientists at the bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. levels; plus engineers and chemical engineers; medicinal, process, and analytical chemists; biochemists; pharmaceutical scientists; molecular and cell biologists; pharmacologists; veterinary scientists; toxicologists and pathologists.