Dr. Joseph Hammang is the senior director of worldwide science at Pfizer Inc., the world's largest pharmaceutical company. On Tuesday, he testified before a meeting of the state House Democratic and Republican policy committees and the House Life Sciences Caucus, held at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse in Oakland. Before speaking there, he visited the Post-Gazette to talk about Pfizer, pharmaceutical research and the life-sciences industry.

Question: What are some of the technology issues facing your industry?

Answer: You've heard, I'm sure, many times that the industry is no longer innovative. It's lacking in its ability to innovate and bring new medicines to the marketplace. ... On the other end of the spectrum, we don't hear about the changing pressures with the regulatory system. In other words, the Food and Drug Administration is becoming more and more focused - the stricture around the pipeline of marketed products is becoming tighter and tighter. That's really good for consumers; the medicines that we deliver today are much more safe and effective than they were in years past. ... So that's all great. But ideas don't always come to fruition [as a result].

Question: Is there a sense that some of the low-hanging fruit has already been harvested, and that the next big cure is going to be far more complex than the discoveries of the 1990s and 2000s?

Answer: That's exactly the point. Obviously, areas like cardiovascular disease, blood pressure, lowering bad cholesterol - those were incredible advances in health care, increased life spans by years and decades in many patients. It's just fabulous products - and almost all of them are going to be generic within a couple years. ... For patients who need those products, it's terrific. [But] Alzheimer's, that's a perfect example. Things don't get much more difficult than that. We're trying to develop products in areas like that, without really good diagnostics, without really being able to understand what's happening in the disease process. It's pretty difficult to develop the drug when you don't understand the mechanism.

Question: Because of the recession, research and development dollars are down or flat from industry to industry. How does that affect a major drug maker?

Answer: What does it mean? It means less ideas get taken into clinic, and less clinical trials and less products and less chances for new products to come to the marketplaces ... all of these things [are] tied to revenues. It's like anything else. ...

The [research and development investment] trend is down, at a time when there's really huge promise, and we have less money to put towards it. That's not easy for R&D managers to make those decisions.

Question: Federal health care reform is being implemented at the same time as a lot of your patented drugs are going to turn generic.

Answer: Every year there are tens of billions of dollars in medicines that go off-patent and become generic. Again, fantastic news for the consumer. ... But the challenge for the industry, before health care reform, is continuing to invest, and understanding where the new revenues will come from. [With] health care reform added into that, additional pressures are going to come onto the system, no question. [We] will also see our share of pressure from Medicare, Medicaid, state programs for the elderly.

Question: Last year Pfizer bought Wyeth, which has a huge vaccine portfolio ...

Answer: One of the things we find so attractive about vaccines is that [if you] eliminate disease before it strikes, prevention is a lot better than a cure. Those are very effective ways of saving the health care system money, so we think that our presence in that is going to be vitally important to our future.

Question: Is the same true of in-licensing - buying or investing in drugs being developed by other companies?

Answer: So many companies have shunned that model. And I think they've shunned it to their detriment. ... I think that our past few CEOs have believed very much in the idea that a lot of great ideas exist outside of our walls. There's lots of great research out there, whether it be in academic institutions or in other small companies. [That's] not a new model for us.

Question: But is it fair to say there will be a greater focus on business development and in-licensing, in light of flat R&D dollars?

Answer: That's very fair to say. [It's] clear that the trend is going to continue.

Question: There's always been a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, the people who read "Cures They Don't Want You To Know About." Is there a wider base of those people today, thanks to the Web?

Answer: It's a remarkable system, where a few outlying issues, I think, taint an industry. ... There are wrong-side surgeries at major medical centers, nurses put the tube in the wrong place, somebody has an allergic reaction to a medicine. ... You want the outcome to be perfect, right? Everybody wants the outcome to be perfect. That happens almost all the time. ...

There is no shortage of crackpots who amplify the junk, the junk science, the junk news ... an amplification of a lot of noise.

Question: But Pfizer has paid billions in fines for illegal, off-label marketing [prodding doctors to prescribe drugs for uses that were not approved by the FDA]. Don't these fines feed the perceptions that the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies are prescribing us medicine that we don't need?

Answer: People make mistakes. We've been fined. And we're making reparations for those mistakes. But they're really, really isolated. You have to understand that the vast majority of the people who work in the industry are doing it for all the right reasons. ... But yes, it absolutely, positively fuels that stuff you read on the Internet. But like so many things, it's blown way, way, way out of proportion.

"Money Q&A" and "Company Town" are featured exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.