Waiting for his lunch to arrive, Graeme Bilbe wants to make sure that the reporter on the other end of his cell phone understands how hard it is to discover a new drug. The U.K.-born, Basel, Switzerland-based head of global neuroscience research at Novartis is dining in southern California with a former pharma colleague, Tamas Bartfai, now chair of the department of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The hors d'oeuvre is a lecture on the industry's staggering attrition rates. "How many ideas do you think you need [to develop a drug]?" demanded Bilbe, who's been with Novartis since 1989. "Take a guess. One thousand? Ten thousand? You need at least that many, if not more. The chances that any of those ideas will ever become a drug are vanishingly small."
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