Francis Cuss is senior vice president, drug discovery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, based in New Jersey, US. He explained to Sarah Houlton why close links with academia are essential for a research-based pharmaceutical company like BMS, and how they have advantages for both sides.

Why are links with academia important for a company like BMS?

The pharmaceutical industry needs the very best scientists, and as they are trained in academia, it makes enormous sense for us to support education. But also, blue-sky research into truly imaginative ideas is not so easy to support in-house, so it is important to support the academic sector, where they happen.

So do you think that by not supporting innovation, you might miss out on something really important?

Definitely. The problem is that innovation is always risky, and you need to have a balanced portfolio, picking up on the innovative ideas in academia. It’s very hard to do comprehensively, and so the next step is to get links with academic groups who may be able to filter you towards what is interesting. So there are a lot of good reasons to have good links with academia.

How do you measure the return on your investment in academia?

No-one’s really come up with a very good format for that! But I think it makes good sense, and without wanting to sound too prim, there is a feeling that we have a duty to academia, and I hope it’s a symbiotic relationship. When scientists are making career decisions, they might first of all think of the pharma industry, and perhaps BMS might be someone they’d apply to. While we make a lot of drugs, few young people will be taking our diabetes medicines, cardiovascular treatments and cancer drugs, and our name is less well known in the UK than some companies. So with our name in front of the students every time they go into the lecture theatre, I guess it is a kind of subliminal advertising. We also fund teaching fellow Bill Nolan in the department. Maybe subliminally is the best possible way!

What did you make of Cambridge Chemistry on your visit here in January?

I was impressed, of course, with the world-class science that is going on in the department. I was also very impressed by how organised the chemistry department has been in terms of seeking sponsorship and how it managed to leverage other people to give money too. I’d much rather make an investment somewhere with a track record of being able to deliver.

I got the sense that the chemistry department has a good balance, concentrating on improving the facilities for teaching as well as research, and also looking at the broader business side with the plans to create a conference suite with commercial uses. I think it’s important to consider the sustainability of donations, and these plans to generate more income show great sophistication in the fundraising.

How else does BMS support academics?

Our ‘Freedom to Discover’ awards are unrestricted grants, which really have no strings attached. They offer about $100,000 a year for five years. The programme has been running for over 25 years, and we’ve given out over $100m over that time. What makes them so powerful is that people have been able to take an out-of-the-box idea and with the seed money start the investigation, without having to worry about whether it is going to give useful results in the short term. And if it does work, it makes it much easier to get formal funding – it’s a force multiplier. The grants are very popular and, I think, unique in the pharma industry.

There has been talk over here in recent years about the difficulty of finding good graduates; is this a problem BMS has been seeing?

Some years ago it was bad, but I think the situation has improved recently. The general trend, unfortunately, for science graduates is downwards, and maybe five or 10 years from now there really will come a problem. There was a fairly large expansion in the pharma industry during the 90s, and in the past two or three years several companies haven’t been growing or have merged. So it’s not been as difficult to find good scientists, purely because we’ve not been looking for so many. All the companies are now being more selective, and are chasing the same good people, such as those that come from Cambridge. But I have a suspicion that there are fewer good science graduates coming through, which reinforces the importance of supporting chemistry teaching.

What are the most important issues facing pharma at the moment?

If you measure the number of drugs that are getting approved, and the money that goes into producing them, we are on the back side of the productivity curve. It’s costing more and more money to produce fewer drugs, and that’s not sustainable. The number of drugs that die in the r&d process, particularly late on, is a real problem. And then there are all the challenges of scale – if you’re too small as a company, how do you get money for investment? Yet, if you’re too large, how do you integrate and communicate within and between sites?

The fundamental underlying challenge is how to get a better return on investment at a time when people who are paying for drugs don’t want to pay more for them. While the drugs cost is just 10 to 15% of the total healthcare budget, they are a very visible target for cost-cutting. I believe that is short-sighted.

When I was in medical school, 25-odd years ago, if you had a peptic ulcer you would need an operation to treat it, and some people died. Now you can buy medicines over the counter that will cure indigestion and treat your ulcer, if you have one. It’s amazing – in a generation, the whole treatment paradigm and prognosis has changed completely, and getting cured just needs a trip to the pharmacist. Pharmaceuticals have also made significant inroads in treating the big killers such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Even viral diseases have proven amenable to drug therapy over the past 20 years.