How Bayer makes decisions to develop new drugs

Drug development is time consuming, resource intensive, risky, and heavily regulated. To ensure that it makes the best drug-development decisions, Bayer Pharmaceuticals (Pharma) uses a structured process based on the principles of decision analysis to evaluate the technical feasibility and market potential of its new drugs. In July 1999, the biological products leadership committee composed of the senior managers within Bayer Biological Products (BP), a business unit of Pharma, made its newly formed strategic-planning department responsible for the commercial evaluation of a new blood-clot-busting drug. Even though Pharma's use of decision analysis began in the late 1980s, this commercial evaluation was BP's first decision analysis project. Previously, BP had analyzed a few business cases for review by Pharma. Pharma senior managers considered our recommendations relevant to their decision making. The project also institutionalized decision analysis at the business-unit level.