Week 4 Learning Team Reflection
Faruque Ahamed, Siead Hasan, Ralph Kitson, and Sangeeta Walia-Chopra
FIN/571
February 10, 2014
Beatrice Jones

In Groton, Connecticut stands one of the largest industrial drug complexes on earth. The structure is 2.8 million square feet and it rests on a place of land that is approximately 160 acres of land. The site was designed to offer the best to drug researchers including flexible office space with mobile accommodations. Such a space offers 250,000 square feet of dedicated facilities that are designed to maximize drug research for profit (Pfizer, 2014). The building even saves money by being self-sustaining with electric car charging stations, micro-turbines and photo-voltaic cells. Research at the Groton facility is devoted to comparative medicine, drug safety, clinical trials, pharmaceuticals, medicinal chemistry, pharmacokinetics and medical dynamics. This entire profile is committedto a company that is unafraid to spend money to make billions in profits. Pfizer is the largest research based drug company in the world with 65 billion dollars in revenue (Pfizer, 2014). Pfizer invests heavily in developing their unique signature pharmaceutical products. For Pfizer a successful drug product has four phases. Phase one is approximately 100 million dollars of investment. Testing is done in labs for several years, from there it is then tested on a small sample population of healthy humans to determine its viability. If successful in phase one, it moves onto phase two, where it is tested on a diseased population. For example, the product Lipitor went through this process. In phase three the new drug is tested on a large patient population, during which it has become FDA approved (Glenn Carter, 2007). The fourth phase of testing is with a very large population. Typically the new drug can be