Looking to the Future for Pharma and the Drug Development Ecosystem.

Developing a therapy for patients in need of treatment is a resource-consuming, labor-intensive process that's fraught with challenges. Pharmaceutical companies have long been the engines driving generation of new medicines. Lara Szewczak spoke with Daria Hazuda, Vice President of Infectious Disease Discovery at Merck & Co. and CSO of MRL Cambridge Exploratory Science Center, and Morris Birnbaum, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Pfizer's Internal Medicine Research Unit about their hopes for how Large Pharma will evolve to address current and future medical needs of complex patient populations. Excerpts from this conversation are presented below, and the full conversation is available with the article online. Editor's note: Due to technical difficulties on the phone call, some text was subsequently revised by D.H. for clarity.