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.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Drug Industry History"

• Drug Development

  The Latest on Drug Failure and Approval Rates

  9 May, 2019

  We now have an updated look at clinical success rates in the industry, and it’s a timely topic. Last year there were 59 approvals by the FDA (a new record), and the year before was good as well. So the question is always whether such numbers are artifacts, random noise, or part of a real… Read More

• Business and Markets

  Drug Industry Consolidation Refuses To Arrive So Quickly

  18 March, 2019

  Anyone who’s watched the biopharmaceutical landscape over the years is familiar with two large forces that reshape the list of companies in the area: on one end, you have mergers and acquisitions that decrease the number of firms, and on the other you have startups that increase it. How have these two been balancing out?… Read More

• Drug Assays

  Experiences With Phenotypic Screening?

  7 March, 2019

  Very little blogging time today, but I wanted to throw a question out to the readership instead. I’m at the Keystone conference on Phenotypic Drug Discovery, so here’s a relevant topic: what are your own experiences with phenotypic screening? Background for those outside the field: broadly speaking, you can sneak up on a drug by… Read More

• Business and Markets

  Institutional Memory

  4 March, 2019

  This is a topic that came up in the comments section of a post last week, but it’s important enough that I wanted to give it some exposure here on the front page. It was a question from someone outside the industry, who asked about how companies can retain “institutional memory”, what with all the… Read More

• Academia (vs. Industry)

  Targets Versus Drugs

  5 February, 2019

  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

• Drug Development

  2018 Drug Approvals: A Closer Look

  4 February, 2019

  Let’s have a look at the recent new drug approvals. 2018 was quite a year, by the numbers. C&E News has a comprehensive roundup: 59 approvals (versus 46 in 2017, which was already a record by itself), and about two-thirds of those small molecules. There are some very interesting molecules in the list, and I… Read More

• Biological News

  Precision Medicine Real Soon Now

  31 January, 2019

  Here’s a strongly opinionated look at where the “precision medicine” field is these days, and I think that this is just the sort of article that the field (and the journalists covering it) need to see, whether you agree with it or not: In 1999 Francis Collins published a foundational document of precision medicine entitled… Read More

• Chemical News

  Defending Drug Synthesis

  29 January, 2019

  This article from Science is a good look at the scientific state of organic synthesis in the pharmaceutical industry. It covers a range of topics which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog as well: synthetic advances such as late-stage functionalization, new bond-forming techniques (photoredox chemistry in particular), the intersection… Read More

• Cancer

  PI3K Inhibitors: You’re Doing It Wrong

  16 November, 2018

  Now here’s an interesting connection between cancer and metabolism, with what look to be direct implications for therapy. A large research team (mostly working out of Weill Cornell) reports some new and important details about PI3K inhibitors, a class of kinase inhibitors that has seen a very large amount of development work indeed. I’v… Read More

• Alzheimer's Disease

  Failure Shouldn’t Be Such an Orphan

  15 November, 2018

  The drug industry has  a huge stockpile of results on projects that have not worked. That much is clear – clinical success rates continue at about 10%, on average, so we have a steady stream failures of all kinds, for all reasons. It would be foolish not to learn as much as we could from… Read More