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.
One of my basic principles is that “Just because you can mess things up by going in one direction doesn’t mean that you can’t mess them up by doing the opposite”. And we may be proving that one again, with this example being the position of Chinese researchers in the US. I will stipulate up… Read More
Some thoughts this morning on universities and industry and their contributions to research – and for once, this isn’t going to be another long screed on drug research in particular. No, I’m particularly talking about what each of these brings to R&D in general, and about the places (both conceptual and physical) where they se… Read More
This is a solid article by Jeffrey Flier (open-access in the Journal of Clinical Investigation) on the roles of academia and industry in drug discovery. Which is a topic that refuses to go away. I am prepared to swear that before starting this blog I had no idea of how many people are convinced that… Read More
Academic research and industrial drug discovery have always been on separate paths, but my impression is that the two understand each other better now than they have at any time during my career. That’s in no small part due to the number of industrial scientists who have moved into academia (itself in no small part… Read More
Many readers of this blog work in the biopharma industry, naturally, and of those, many are in and around the (few) locations where a great many of the companies in the industry are born. I myself am in the Boston/Cambridge area, famously thick with companies large and small, and then you have the Bay area… Read More
There was a comment on the blog the other day about how there are people in academia who feel that the discovery of a new target or pathway is basically finding a new drug, and that the rest is “technicalities”. I’ve encountered that view of the world before (Donald Light/Rebecca Warburton, Marcia Angell, and similarly Arnold… Read More
There have been several hearings in Washington on the drug industry and drug prices, and there are going to be more. Drug pricing is a large and messy issue, for sure, and all I’ll say about it today is to ask everyone to read Jack Scannell on it before expressing an opinion. I’m not going… Read More
Update: see the comments section. The editors of the journal are calling this “a highly unusual and unfortunate error” and are taking steps to correct it. Now, this is a situation that I haven’t seen mentioned before. A reader (from one division of a large pharma company that I won’t name) had prepared a manuscript… Read More
In 2015, a study looked at drug-industry sponsored clinical trials versus those funded by the NIH, and concluded that about 20% of industry trials did not report results when required to do so, while the figure for NIH-sponsored research was about 50% (and even more for trials funded by other institutions). At the time, I… Read More
I have enough time today for a quick question, one that’s also being asked by several people on Twitter. Back when I was a grad student, there was definite pressure on people to seek an academic position. I saw more than one group where this pressure was applied selectively to the more promising-seeming grad students/postdocs… Read More
