The Hindu : Business : Drug firms woo top scientists

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Monday, Nov 29, 2004

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Business

Drug firms woo top scientists

Pharmaceutical companies offer better cash compensation packages, but biotechnology companies offer more flexibility, greater responsibility, and stock options.

A HIRING binge by big pharmaceutical companies that have muscled into the Boston area is generating hot competition for top research scientists, who are being stalked by recruiters and are mulling over multiple job offers.

Drug companies that have built gleaming new research centres — Novartis AG, Merck & Co., and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LLP — are aggressively recruiting from Boston-area biotechs and academic research centres as they gear up to find the next generation of treatments. As a result, phones are ringing in Cambridge. Company websites list scores of jobs.

Salaries, typically higher in the pharmaceutical industry than they are in biotechnology, are rising. Scientists with doctorates can expect to start at $80,000 to $90,000, executives and consultants said. Competition could heat up more as California embarks on a $3 billion stem-cell research programme.

The number of Massachusetts jobs in scientific research and development grew 5.4 per cent from September 2003 to September 2004, mostly because of stronger hiring in research for new medicines. That is much better than the overall economy. In the same period, the total number of non-farm jobs in Massachusetts shrank by 0.2 per cent.

Merck's salary and benefits package was among the factors that attracted Alan Northrup, a biochemist with a newly conferred doctoral degree who studied at the California Institute of Technology, to sign up at the company's research facility next door to Harvard Medical School. While companies are competing for doctorate degree holders like Mr. Northrup, they also are searching far and wide for lower-level scientists with bachelor's and master's degrees — those who turn ideas into test-tube experiments.

Victor Kamhi, a chemist with a master's degree, moved to AstraZeneca from a pharmaceutical company in Connecticut. He also had been weighing an offer from Novartis, but chose AstraZeneca because he liked its location in suburban Waltham. At 51, it was a nice position to be in, with huge drug companies demanding his services.

Pharmaceutical companies offer better cash compensation packages, but biotechnology companies offer more flexibility, greater responsibility, and stock options. The biggest source of new pharmaceutical jobs in the Boston area has been Novartis, which in one year has hired 700 people, toward a goal of 1,000.

The Swiss company started feeding off the Boston scientific community as soon as it announced that it was relocating its global research headquarters to the Necco candy building next door to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It began by hiring Mark Fishman, a world-class genetic scientist from Massachusetts General Hospital, to head up its global research. That gave Novartis instant credibility and a major recruiting advantage.

In addition to the Novartis research headquarters, AstraZeneca opened its facility in Waltham in 2003 and now employs more than 400 at the site. Merck opened a new research laboratory in Boston last month and says it will have 300 people hired by 2006.

Human resources directors at some biotechnology companies say they are feeling the recruiting pressure introduced by the big pharmaceuticals, but they have been able to replace anyone who has departed. The larger, more established Boston-area biotechs are beginning to bring discoveries into the development and clinical trial stage, which requires new executives with experience in federal regulations. In fact, many of the development vice presidents that biotechs are hiring come from large pharmaceutical companies, local recruiters said.

As it steps up its development efforts, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Cambridge, has doubled its rate of new hiring, from 56 in the first three quarters of last year to 103 in the first three quarters of this year.

College advisers who help new chemists get jobs say the Boston bioscience jobs market is hot compared to the rest of the country. But John Radford, senior vice president at Aon Consulting's Radford Surveys, in San Jose, Calif., said voter approval this month of $3 billion for stem cell research in California is going to create a huge demand for scientists on the West Coast very quickly.

The industry nationwide is already showing signs of a rebound. According to the Radford Survey, the number of biotech companies nationwide reporting layoffs dropped from 25 per cent in the second quarter of 2003 to 7 per cent in the second quarter of 2004.

Another positive sign for the recruiting business, Radford said, is that 41 per cent of companies report that there are too few job-seeking candidates with the appropriate scientific and technical skills. That means wages will rise as biotech and pharmaceutical companies try to attract the best scientists from laboratories across the street or across town.

"What you do is look around,'' he said, "and try to get your employees from your competitor.''

Christopher Rowland

New York Times News Service

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Drug firms woo top scientists