Since our founding, POPI has been building a stable base from which to extend its research and educational offerings. We have succeeded in bringing together discipline-based faculty from three MIT schools to participate in multidisciplinary research and teaching focused on the pharmaceutical industry, serving the MIT community as a paradigm for future building of multidisciplinary bridges across the Institute. We also have served one of MIT's key goals: to be at the center of industry-focused dialogues between business leaders and government.
These efforts are bolstered by an effective leadership structure, with three co-directors from different disciplines and an advisory board drawing from several important POPI constituencies. This has helped POPI to enter into some important new collaborations with other groups that are advancing our goals and objectives: with the Consortium for Advancement of Manufacturing in Pharmaceuticals (CAMP), the Harvard-MIT Center for Experimental Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the Research Program on Pharmaceuticals in the Workplace.
POPI is led by three co-directors: Dr. Thomas J. Allen, Dr. Charles L. Cooney and Dr. Stan N. Finkelstein. Each director has extensive experience with multidisciplinary research and teaching. Our co-directors are supported by a part-time financial manager and a full-time administrative assistant. Day-to-day management responsibility for the Program is held by Dr. Finkelstein.
POPI's principal advisory committee includes eleven distinguished members: senior executives from pharmaceutical firms; senior executives from other firms that serve as part of the industry's infrastructure; a divisional director at the Food and Drug Administration; and senior members of the MIT faculty. One of these faculty members is the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine and chairs the biology department; the other is director of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. A complete list of Advisory Committee members is included as Appendix F.
In addition to our formal advisory committee, POPI has benefitted from the guidance offered by an informal set of advisors made up of faculty who oversee our various projects. This group, often referred to as the "steering committee," includes Dean Urban (Sloan School), Professors Berndt (economics, Sloan School) and Sinskey (biology), and POPI's co-directors.
One of POPI's key strengths has been our ability to attract high-quality faculty and students to participate in our research projects, and to attract support for our work from other constituencies, particularly from the pharmaceutical industry itself.
POPI has been successful in attracting high-quality faculty and students from around MIT to participate in our research and teaching. We have integrated faculty from nearly all of the essential disciplines for our initial set of projects. Similarly, we have enjoyed participation by excellent students at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
While two-thirds of our faculty participation has been from senior faculty, a sustainable center needs participation from both senior and junior faculty. Career development and promotion rewards for junior faculty traditionally come from their participation in the more established (and thus risk-free) research programs. Now that POPI is five years old and has a visible program with respected faculty members, we continue to observe an increase in the number of junior faculty who have come forward to discuss their possible involvement. We look forward to incorporating one or two new junior faculty into POPI activities each academic year.
Since our founding in 1991, POPI has received generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of its program in support of its centers for the study of industry. We have just completed the fifth year of continuous support from the Foundation. In December 1993, Merck agreed to provide program support to POPI for up to three years as part of its centers of excellence program. Beginning in 1994, Pfizer made a major commitment to provide support to POPI research projects. Over the past three years, several other firms have made commitments to provide project support and/or large amounts of data, including Aetna Health Plans, Amgen, Genentech, Genzyme, IMS, Lilly, and Upjohn.
MIT has begun a major manufacturing technology initiative in collaboration with Purdue University, Sigel, and several pharmaceutical companies. This industry/university Consortium for the Advancement of Manufacturing in Pharmaceuticals will be dedicated to the identification, research and development of new manufacturing technologies. Its objective is to improve healthcare delivery by lowering product cost and decreasing time it takes to get new products to patients.
POPI has entered into a collaboration with the Center for Experimental Pharmacology and Therapeutics in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. This Center-under the direction of Robert H. Rubin, M.D.-is a bidirectional, multidisciplinary, clinical research effort in which quantitative science and technology from MIT are united with the clinical science of the Harvard teaching hospitals to advance biomedical science and clinical medicine.
The cornerstone of the Center is the development, validation, and application of unique technologies for making quantitative measurements. Thus, drugs are viewed as probes for perturbing biologic systems that make serial measurements more meaningful.
MIT brings exceptional skills and technology to the Center, key to its bidirectional aspect. MIT participants assist in developing new technologies to facilitate the accomplishment of research goals set by the Center; this participation is furthered through a commitment to facilitate the clinical and animal model evaluation of new technologies developed by MIT scientists.
POPI and the Center have joined forces to develop a research and educational program for clinical investigators that aims to integrate the management sciences and economics into the drug development process.
POPI is building a new consortium, which at present is being referred to as the Research Program on Pharmaceuticals in the Workplace. This effort is being led jointly by POPI and staff members of the healthcare group of Analysis Group Economics, Inc., headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Initial funding support for this effort has come from Pfizer, with in-kind support-including data-provided by Aetna Health Plans.
This new collaboration has grown out of research, originally reported in 1993 by a joint POPI/Analysis Group Economics team, on the economics of mental depression. The researchers observed that nearly 55 percent of the annual $44 billion cost of depression in the United States was borne in the workplace-half from absenteeism and half due to reduced productivity at work on the part of depression sufferers.
At present, efforts are underway to build a program that systematically examines the relationship between change in productivity at work and the treatment of chronic and acute conditions that affect working age populations, such as back pain, respiratory and gastrointestinal illness, migraine, hypertension, and some psychiatric disorders. Exploratory analysis has been undertaken of a new employee database that links objective measurement of work performance with medical care utilization. The collaborating groups are organizing a conference on the subject, scheduled for November 1996.
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