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.
Here’s a useful article that looks at the fate of university-licensed startup (ULS) life sciencecompanies over the last few years. There are more and more such companies (a greater than tenfold increase in their number since 1990), but a comprehensive look at success rates (and how such rates vary according to the universities involved) has… Read More
Science has an interesting report on the publication of clinical trial results. Some readers will recall similar efforts from 2015 and 2017/2018 in the US and Europe; this is actually a follow-up by one of the same US authors. It should actually be a dull report, because the requirements for such disclosure are clear. The rules… Read More
This paper is right, and it says things that need to be said. I wonder, though, if saying them will do any good. Let me explain what the heck I’m talking about! The paper is titled “Blocking the Hype-Hypocrisy-Falsification-Fakery Pathway is Needed to Safeguard Science“, and I don’t see how anyone can really disagree. When… Read More
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
