We aspire to be the best human therapeutics company.  Achieving our goal starts with building the best R&D organization. Our R&D engine is powered by dedicated, creative scientists who are attracted to Amgen by our intellectual vigor, our commitment to world-class research, and most importantly, by the many opportunities we offer to make a dramatic difference in the lives of patients. Four principles guide our R&D efforts. 

The first is to focus on developing therapies that benefit patients’ suffering from the greatest unmet medical needs. 

The second is to be modality independent—to fit the tool to the task. We are not driven to work in a disease area by our drug development capabilities. For us, the question is always: What’s the best therapeutic approach for a particular disease? 

Our third major emphasis is to study disease in patients.  All too often, our industry has found that experimental models have little predictive value with respect to human disease, which often results in the failure of clinical trials and escalating drug development costs.

Our fourth guiding principle, seamless integration, informs everything we do.  We strive to integrate our organization, incorporating the perspectives from sales and marketing, clinical development and basic research into all of our drug development programs.  

These four guiding principles, together with hard work, intelligence, intuition, and some luck, will help us achieve our aspiration to become the best human therapeutics company.