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.
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
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
Unfortunately, we have another example of “price of ancient generic drug shoots through roof”. Whenever this happens, the first thing to look at is the regulatory environment. After that you can go on about the greed of the company and its executives, the stupidity of the insurance companies, all the usual stuff, and you won’t… Read More
Let the arguing commence! That’s my response to the announcement this morning by Sangamo, a company that’s been trying to do gene therapy in the clinic. They’re not a CRISPR outfit, though – they’re using an alternate technique for gene silencing, using zinc finger regions instead. Even at that level, there’s mor… Read More
Here’s an example of the current regulatory framework – you may like it, you may not, but if you’re doing drug research you should know that it’s going on. The way it’s traditionally worked – for decades – has been that a company develops a drug, runs clinical trials, etc., puts together a (huge) data… Read More
I’ve had numerous requests for my opinion about this article, so here it comes: it’s largely bullshit. It’s about “a volunteer network of anarchists and hackers developing DIY medical technologies”, and I can see why Vice.com is running the article, because that drugs/anarchists/hackers combo is absolute catnip to thei… Read More
It’s been a while since we talked about drug reimportation here, but it’s been back in the news recently. Drug prices are, naturally, of economic, medical, and political importance, and the administration has been making a great deal of noise about lowering them. To that end, HHS Secretary Alex Azar has announced the formation of a… Read More
Update: Brainstorm has now abandoned their Right-to-Try approach. Who’s next? That didn’t take long. That didn’t take long at all. The federal “Right to Try” bill was just signed the other week, and we already have a company that’s willing – no, eager – to try it out. I will now cruelly caricature som… Read More
Just what is going on at Celgene? They’ve had some odd recent setbacks (such as as the failure of Mongersen), and another such acquisition, Ozanimod, had its filing recently rejected by the FDA. Several things about that incident were eyebrow-raisers – for one, it’s rare for a large, established company to get an outright refusal- Read More
I wrote a couple of months ago about the disappointing results that AbbVie had obtained with their cancer stem cell therapy “Rova-T” (rovalpituzumab tesirine) in small-cell lung cancer. This was the antibody-drug conjugate that they’d purchased from Stemcentryx – OK, let’s clarify that, they bought Stemcentryx out comp… Read More
