Outsourcing to exploit a key asset.

Much has been written and debated about the economic and organizational advantages of outsourcing a growing list of operations in drug discovery. In what has been described as a modular approach to drug discovery, whole sections of the process are now handled very effectively by a wide variety of specialist suppliers to the pharmaceutical industry. Here we report on a novel outsourced solution to the challenge of consolidating and managing some of the key assets residing within a major research organization - its chemical intermediates. At Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development this resource has been built up over a period of more than 40 years, and is added to daily. The challenge was to provide the company's scientists with a single source for its own and externally procured intermediates; the solution was developed working in partnership with Sigma-Aldrich.