Pfizer: ‘fewer scientists’ after merger
pharmafile | May 14, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Read, Soriot, UK, Willetts, merger, takeover
Pfizer’s proposed takeover of AstraZeneca would result in there being fewer scientists from both companies in the UK than currently work here, the company’s chief executive admitted to MPs.
Responding to questions from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Ian Read said any new entity would not require the numbers which both companies now employ.
“There will be less scientists than the individual sum of the two,” he said. “The combined research budget will go down.”
Pressed for figures, he said it was not possible to put a number on it, before insisting: “We are not going to underinvest in the combined company.”
Yesterday Read was grilled by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, reiterating that Pfizer would keep 20% of its global R&D workforce in the UK, and maintain AstraZeneca’s factory in Macclesfield.
Answering questions on the potential threat of the merger to the UK’s science base today, Read said it would be ‘irresponsible’ for him to reveal the figures on which Pfizer’s own financial modelling had been based when making the £63 billion bid for AstraZeneca.
In one testy exchange, Read was admonished by the committee’s chair Andrew Miller MP for saying that Pfizer did not know enough about AstraZeneca’s science to answer specific questions on figures.
Miller had asked whether, rather than cutting the number of scientists, it would make ‘more sense’ to commit to keep R&D in the combined company at the same level or even increase it.
“You know enough about the company to put a very significant number of noughts on the end of your offer,” Miller said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know their science – of course you do.”
Mikael Dolsten, president, worldwide R&D at Pfizer, told the committee that a combined company – the biggest pharma firm in the world – would be able to compete in oncology with Roche and Novartis.
Labour leader Ed Miliband has already questioned Pfizer’s ‘track record’ in the UK: the company was hauled in front of a Commons committee in 2011 after its decision to axe its own main European R&D site in Sandwich, Kent with hundreds of job cuts.
Dolsten told MPs today that Pfizer ‘took the learning from Sandwich’ and Read pointed out that AstraZeneca had also cut its science base in the UK over recent years.
Dolsten surprised Miller when he said it would take only ‘a couple of months’ to fully evaluate AstraZeneca’s science if a deal between the two companies went through.
Worries over the reliability of the commitments Pfizer is making have been a key part of the political and media debate over the proposed takeover.
Sarah Newton MP asked Read what powers were available to enforce the pledges that Pfizer put into its letter to UK prime minister David Cameron.
Read replied that they would become part of the formal bid document, which then became legally binding and which the takeover panel could then refer to the High Court for redress.
“The promise is from Pfizer and the board of directors: we will meet these commitments,” Read concluded.
Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca chief executive, was also called to give evidence. Asked by David Morris MP about what the government’s stance on the takeover bid should be, Soriot was non-committal.
“I am a biologist and try to do my job,” he said. “We simply try to progress our pipeline and bring medicines to patients. I am not a policy-maker. The government should decide whether they should or should not have a policy [on the bid].”
Universities and science minister David Willetts refused to shine any more light on the government’s thinking on the issue.
Asked by Miller whether the takeover would be good for UK science, he said: “We will press very hard on the importance of maintaining science and R&D in the UK.”
He repeated this when asked by Graham Stringer MP what would happen if the government felt the deal would be a bad idea, leading Stringer to criticise what he called a ‘very passive answer’.
“Pressing very hard may not be enough,” he said, before asking whether there was a case for changing the public interest test which can be used to determine the desirability of such deals.
Willetts declined to be drawn on what the government might do, leading Stringer to suggest that if there was a hostile takeover which damaged UK science then the government would do nothing about it.
He called this an “extraordinary position for a science minister to take”.
Adam Hill
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