The pharmaceutical industry has a drug problem: it can't find enough new ones. Companies are under pressure to invent the next Prozac or Viagra, but without more efficient and cost-effective ways to develop new drugs, those kinds of blockbuster medications will remain once-in-a-decade discoveries. "It costs too much, it takes too long and it produces too little," says Rod MacKenzie, a vice president in Pfizer's Global Research and Development division, of the industry's traditional method of drug discovery. "The problem is, how do you change the engine while the vehicle is still moving?"

One solution to the problem of retooling Pfizer's $4.4 billion R&D engine is its Discovery Technology Center, a gleaming two-and-a-half-year-old facility in Cambridge, MA, where the company's scientists team up with academic researchers and small biotech firms to develop computerized methods for screening thousands of potential drug molecules per day. Key to the lab's strategy are its small size (just 70 researchers out of the 3,000 involved in drug discovery across Pfizer) and its location, at the center of the Boston-area biotech hothouse and a healthy distance from Pfizer's main R&D facility in New London, CT. "We're small and we're offline in the sense that we don't have the same day-to-day pressures of productivity that the other sites do," says MacKenzie, who directs the center. "And what happens here in Cambridge is that people beat a path to our door," including researchers from some of the area's top academic institutions.