Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Igor Landau of Aventis must have been seen a performance of King Lear recently, to judge from his tactics to fend off Sanofi’s hostile takeover bid. Or since the following also has a “Do you feel lucky?” ring to it, maybe they’ve been watching old Clint Eastwood movies instead. Surely those have been dubbed into… Read More
I wanted to pass along a couple of recent articles that address drug pricing and research costs. It’s a subject that attracts nonsense like a cloud of gnats; every so often you have to shoo them off. Here’s a fine post from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: In 2003, Joseph DiMasi, Ronald Hansen, and Henry… Read More
So Entremed is finally giving up on its celebrated peptide drug candidates, angiostatin and endostatin. I’m sorry to see what the company, and its employees have been through, but I’m even sorrier when I think about what cancer patients have been through during this story. Especially those of them who read that (in)famous New York… Read More
“Twenty-five years of being a laboratory chemist, says Gregory Hlatky today, and this is the first time I’ve had an incident.” Hey, maybe he’s been doing the wrong kind of chemistry. Some kinds can almost guarantee you an incident every month or two! Actually, the kind of chemistry he does (organometallics) is already pretty… Read More
Now that the suspected ricin in the Senate (and White House?) has been confirmed, I thought I’d repost a version of something I wrote about a year ago on my previous site, Lagniappe. (This was written after British authorities had rounded up several suspects in London who had some ricin of their own.) So what… Read More
While I’m talking about inventorship on patents, I should note that there’s a factor that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: luck. Well, not the public attention, anyway. But talk to any group of researchers about who gets on which patent, or whose lab produced the most active compounds in any given project, and the… Read More
Now that the suspected ricin in the Senate (and White House?) has been confirmed, I thought I’d repost a version of something I wrote about a year ago on my previous site, Lagniappe. (This was written after British authorities had rounded up several suspects in London who had some ricin of their own.) So what… Read More
The inventor of the blue-light diode, Shuji Nakamura, has been fighting for some years now for a bigger piece of the profits from his invention. Since his original payment was about US $189, that’s easy to imagine. The New York Times article on the case is fine, as far as it goes, but it contains… Read More
Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution is proposing an interesting idea: He’s suggesting that the lifetime of a patent be adjusted for the R&D costs that went into the ideas behind it. Things that took little effort would have a short term until expiration, while those who went through expensive slogs would have a better… Read More
The January 22 issue of Nature has a fine essay by Freeman Dyson (a hero of mine, I should add) about a fateful meeting he had with Enrico Fermi back in 1953. This was back when Dyson was a professor at Cornell, studying both the weak and strong nuclear forces. There was a fine theoretical… Read More
