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.
I have an anniversary to celebrate this time of year: it’s now been thirty years since I started work in industrial drug discovery. Given the state of the industry over that time, just being able to say that at all has called for some luck and some flexibility along the way, but I’m very glad… Read More
The Wall Street Journal published a provocative article the other day, entitled “Don’t Understand Moronic Bromides?” about the proliferation over the years of acronyms in science.(Note the old-fashioned usage of “bromide” derived from the early sleeping pills). And while it’s a cranky piece, it’s not wrong. Read More
Here’s an interesting analysis of the industry from IDEA Pharma, via Endpoints. They’re looking at the revenues from the more recent drugs in the pipeline (approved in the last five years) and comparing that to each company’s total R&D spending. The list is all Big Pharma – the cutoff is companies that have at least… Read More
Hot new technologies! We have waves of them in this business, and everyone talks about them, spends money looking at them, and does deals with small companies who are formed around them. But then reality sets in: only a few of these things march forward into the clinic, and even fewer emerge on the other… Read More
News broke yesterday morning (first at the Wall Street Journal, I believe) that Abbvie has agreed to acquire Allergan. This is one of the larger pharma mergers of recent years, and regular readers of this site will have a pretty good idea of the sigh and roll of the eyes with which I greet it. Read More
The recent post here on automation in chemistry (especially medicinal chemistry) is a good intro for this paper in ACS Med. Chem. Letters. It’s from David Parry, who led Cyclofluidic, and I’ve blogged about them a few times over the years. That was a company formed in 2008 in the UK to try to develop… Read More
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
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
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
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
