MedWorm provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest medical blog items that have been tagged with 'drug industry'. Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:48:29 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=5118974&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F08%2F10%2Fthe_economics_of_the_drug_industry_big_cant_be_big_enough.php I wanted to extract and annotate a comment of Bernard Munos' from the most recent post discussing his thoughts on the industry. Like many of the ones in that thread, there's a lot inside it to think about: (Arthur) De Vany has shown that the movie industry has developed clever tools (e.g., adaptive contracts) to deal with (portfolio uncertainty). That may come to pharma too, and in fact he is working on creating such tools. In the meantime, one can build on the work of Frank Scherer at Harvard, and Dietmar Harhoff. (Andrew Lo at MIT is also working on this). Using simulations, they have shown that traditional portfolio management (as practiced in pharma) does achieve a degree of risk mitigation, but far too little to be effective. In other words, because of the extremely skewed probabilit... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=5118974 Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:45:04 +0100 5118974 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=5107876&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F08%2F08%2Fread_the_comments.php Just wanted to point out to anyone who's not reading the comments here that the ones to this post are of extremely high quality. If you want to hear the thoughts of a lot of intelligent, experienced people on what's wrong with the drug industry and what might be done to fix it, have a look. (Source: In the Pipeline) In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=5107876 Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:42:09 +0100 5107876 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=5097043&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F08%2F02%2Fmerck_moving_research_from_rahway.php I've heard from more than one person that Merck has decided to move most discovery research out of Rahway (in favor of the former Schering-Plough site in Kenilworth). Details are welcome in the comments from those with better information. That news does bring on end-of-an-era feelings, since they've been doing medicinal chemistry in Rahway for a long, long time. Kenilworth - well, I joined Schering-Plough when it was still in Bloomfield, and I remember the Kenilworth building site when it was a huge hole in the ground. We migrated into it (the building, not the hole) at the end of 1992, in a massive moving job that involved several convoys of 18-wheel trucks going down a partially-closed-off Garden State Parkway in the middle of the night. The move had to be done; Bloomfield was at the li... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=5097043 Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:42:43 +0100 5097043 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=5078012&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F07%2F28%2Fthe_secret_history_of_pfizer.php Here's a fascinating account at Fortune of the departure of Jeff Kindler as Pfizer's CEO. The magazine says that they interviewed over 100 people to round up the details, but some of these meetings only feature four or five people in a room, so that narrows things down a bit. It's also a back-room history of Pfizer over the last ten or fifteen years, and there's a lot of high-level political stuff that wasn't widely known at the time: McKinnell kept boosting R&D budgets, maintaining Pfizer's "shots on goal" approach -- the more compounds you explored, in theory, the more drugs you'd generate. But drugs can take a full decade to be developed and approved, and nothing big would be ready for years. So McKinnell fell back on the refuge of the desperate pharma CEO: In July 2002 he announced t... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=5078012 Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:48:17 +0100 5078012 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=5008634&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F07%2F07%2Fphenotypic_screening_for_the_win.php Here's another new article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that (for once) isn't titled something like "The Productivity Crisis in Drug Research: Hire Us And We'll Consult Your Problems Away". This one is a look back at where drugs have come from. Looking over drug approvals (259 of them) between 1999 and 2008, the authors find that phenotypic screens account for a surprising number of the winners. (For those not in the business, a phenotypic screen is one where you give compounds to some cell- or animal-based assay and look for effects. That's in contrast to the target-based approach, where you identify some sort of target as being likely important in a given disease state and set out to find a molecule to affect it. Phenotypic screens were the only kinds around in the old days (before,... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=5008634 Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:24:34 +0100 5008634 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4976190&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F06%2F28%2Fdrug_rd_spending_now_down_but_look_at_the_history.php I hate to be such a shining beacon of happiness today, but this news can't very well be ignored, can it? For the first time ever, total drug R&D spending seems to have declined: The global drug industry cut its research spending for the first time ever in 2010, after decades of relentless increases, and the pace of decline looks set to quicken this year. Overall expenditure on discovering and developing new medicines amounted to an estimated $68 billion last year, down nearly 3 percent on the $70 billion spent in both 2008 and 2009, according to Thomson Reuters data released on Monday. The fall reflects a growing disillusionment with poor returns on pharmaceutical R&D. Disappointing research productivity is arguably the biggest single factor behind the declining valuations of the sector... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4976190 Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:43:56 +0100 4976190 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4829282&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F05%2F16%2Fups_and_downs.php I was thinking the other day that I never remembered hearing the phrase "Big Pharma" when I first got a job in this business (1989). Now I have some empirical proof, thanks to the Google Labs Ngram Viewer, that the phrase has only come into prominence more recently. (Fair warning: you can waste substantial amounts of time messing with this site). Here's the incidence rate of "big pharma" in English-language books from 1988 to 2000. It comes from nowhere, blips to life in 1992, doesn't even really get off the baseline until 1994 or so, and then takes off. (The drops in 2005 and 2008 remain unexplained - did the log phase of its growth end in 2004?) Update: that graph holds for the uncapitalized version of the phrase. If you put the words in caps, you get the even more dramatic takeoff show... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4829282 Mon, 16 May 2011 12:06:15 +0100 4829282 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4684733&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F04%2F07%2Fwhats_really_killing_pharma.php Anthony Nicholls over at OpenEye really unburdens himself here, in a post that I recommend to anyone in the business (or anyone who wants to see what some of our problems are). Some highlights: I have come to believe (and I admit that this is only a theory) that as more and more of pharma’s budget was funneled into advertising and direct marketing to both the general public and to doctors themselves, the path to the top in pharma ceased to be via the lab bench and instead was by way of Madison Avenue. . . . . .I want to end with one of my favorite management insanities- the push within big pharma to remake themselves in the image of biotechs—the reasoning being that biotechs “get things done” and are more productive. Leaving aside the fact that over its history, biotech as a whol... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4684733 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:55:23 +0100 4684733 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4419432&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F01%2F31%2Fwhats_the_most_worthwhile_new_drug_since_1990.php A query from a reader prompts me to ask this question, in preparation for a rather long post in the new future. What do you think is the most worthwhile new pharmaceutical brought to market since 1990? That's an arbitrary cutoff, but twenty years is a reasonable sample size. And I'll let everyone define "worthwhile" as they see fit - improvement over existing drugs, opening new therapeutic areas, cost-effectiveness, what have you. Just be sure to make your case, briefly, when you nominate a candidate. Let's see, first off, if it's a topic that can be agreed on at all. (Source: In the Pipeline) In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4419432 Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:16:17 +0100 4419432 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4305093&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2011%2F01%2F03%2Fand_so_2011.php So, let's get things underway around here: 2010 was, as has been the rule, Not A Good Year for the drug industry. But overall, I think it did break the pattern that had been going since about 2006, of each year being worse than the one before. That's just an impression, mind you, but perhaps some sort of bottom has been reached? We'll find out. My guess is that 2011 will end up looking more like the prelude to 2012. We have a number of patent expirations coming up (with Lipitor, late this year, as the marquee event), but they'll probably affect next year's earning's more than this year. (Note that if you're a research-driven drug company, these things are bad news, but if you're a generic company (or a drug store chain), the picture is much rosier. Predictions for this year can be entere... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4305093 Mon, 03 Jan 2011 13:53:00 +0100 4305093 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4197343&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F11%2F23%2Fof_deck_chairs_six_sigma_and_what_really_ails_us.php We talked a little while back here about "Lean Six Sigma" as applied to drug discovery organizations, and I notice that the AstraZeneca team is back with another paper on the subject. This one, also from Drug Discovery Today, at least doesn't have eleventeen co-authors. It also addresses the possibility that not everyone in the research labs might welcome the prospect of a business-theory-led revolution in the way that they work, and discusses potential pitfalls. But I'm not going to discuss them here, at least not today. Because this reminds me of the post last week about the Novartis "Lab of the Future" project, and of plenty of other initiatives, proposals, alliances, projects, and ideas that are floating around this industry. Here's what they have in common: they're all distractions. ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4197343 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:14:55 +0100 4197343 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4065599&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F10%2F13%2Fwell_okay_the_ugliest_biopharma_sites.php In response to a reader query in the comments to yesterday's post on scenic research sites, I guess we should explore the other end of the scale. Nominations for the ugliest/most depressing research site are now open. This is physical surroundings, folks, not mental atmosphere, not that that can't get oppressive at times. We're looking for things that can be captured by a camera. There can be a connections, though - as Kingsley Amis put it ("Aberdarcy, Main Square"): The journal of some bunch of architects Named this the worst town center they could find But how disparage what so well reflects Permanent tendencies of heart and mind? Looking back, Schering-Plough's old Bloomfield site was not exactly a sweeping vista of loveliness, but (to be fair) it did look better than some of the rest... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4065599 Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:25:31 +0100 4065599 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4061066&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F10%2F12%2Fmost_picturesque_biopharma_location.php I'm sitting in my conference, listening to a guy from Emerald Biostructures, the former deCODE. They're in a site out on Bainbridge Island near Seattle - I've talked with several people from out there, and they all talk about riding the ferry out in the morning, etc. Now, Cambridge is OK, but it ain't Bainbridge Island as far as scenery goes. (However, as someone who used to life and work in northern NJ, I have to be happy with what I have!) So here's my question: what's the most scenic, envy-inducing location for a biopharma research site? For these purposes, we'll rank by natural beauty - if there's some biotech that's leasing the top floors of the Chrysler Building, and I sure don't think that there is, we'll take them up as a separate category. Nominations? (Source: In the Pipeline) In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4061066 Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:55:21 +0100 4061066 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4061067&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F10%2F12%2Fdrug_discovery_history.php One of the speakers here yesterday recommended Walter Sneader's Drug Discovery: A History, which I haven't read. It looks good, though, for a look back on how we got here. He also showed some drug structure "family trees" from Sneader's earlier book, Drug Prototypes and Their Exploitation. I haven't seen a copy of that one in quite a while, and no wonder: the only copy shown on Amazon is used, for $500. Sheesh. (Source: In the Pipeline) In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4061067 Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:11:40 +0100 4061067 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3999272&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F09%2F24%2Fserendipity_in_medicine.php I came across this book the other day, and bought it on sight: Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. From what I've read of it so far, it's a fine one-stop-reference for all sorts of medical discoveries where fortune favored the prepared mind (as Pasteur put it). There are drug discovery tales, surgical procedures, medical devices, and more. Even the stories I thought I knew well turn out to have more details. Albert Hoffman's famous discovery of LSD, for example - what I hadn't known was that some of his colleagues didn't believe him when he said he'd taken only 0.25mg of a compound and hallucinated violently for hours. (From what we now know, that was actually a heck of a dose!) So Ernst Rothlin, Sandoz's head of pharmacology, and two others tried it themselves. ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3999272 Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:59:41 +0100 3999272 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3943011&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F09%2F07%2Fcolumns_outside_the_doors.php Nature Reviews Drug Discovery has an article on behavior in large drug organizations, which they put together after interviewing a long list of current and former R&D heads. Many of the recommendations are non-startling (find ways to reward people who are willing to take calculated risks, encourage independent thinking, all those things that are easy to write down and hard to implement). One part near the end caught my eye, though: Companies should examine what we term the 'columns outside the doors' phenomenon and the subtle impact that this form of recognition might have on entrepreneurial behaviour. Smith described this phenomenon, which occurs across the world: as start-up companies become successful, they are relocated from humble laboratories to grander buildings with columns outsid... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3943011 Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:25:34 +0100 3943011 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3889295&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F08%2F20%2Fgoing_hollywood.php A reader at one of the big pharma companies sends along this note: . . .Over my 10 years or so of experience, I have seen a severe decline in risk tolerance at my company, and other large companies as well. When we put a project forward, we are told that either: (a) There are too many unknowns, the target is not well established, and therefore the risk in putting forward the large sums of money required for development are too high; or (b) There are too many other players in the market already and we would never be able to capture enough market share to justify the investment required to go forward. The band considered acceptable in the risk/benefit spectrum has become so narrow that it is like threading a needle with your feet. I believe that this risk aversion is due to the escalating ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3889295 Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:28:06 +0100 3889295 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3885537&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F08%2F19%2Fnot_the_end_not_at_all.php All right, given the way things have been going the last few years, it's easy to wonder if there's a place for medicinal chemistry at all - even if there's a place for drug discovery. There is. People are continuing to get sick, with diseases that no one can do much about, and the world would be a much better place if that weren't so. I also believe that such treatments are worth money, and that the people who devote their careers to finding them can earn a good living by doing so. So why are fewer of us doing so? Because - and it needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this - we're not finding as many of them as we need to, and it's costing us too much when we do. That's not sustainable, but drug discovery itself has to continue. We can't go on, we'll go on. But what we have to do ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3885537 Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:08:50 +0100 3885537 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3802575&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F07%2F29%2Fopensource_pharmaceutical_babble.php The topic of "open-source" drug discovery is an interesting (and potentially important) one. It just keeps coming up, but one of the problems with it is that it presents a terrible opportunity for vagueness. Too much of what I've read on the subject is hand-waving. I'm afraid that the key parts of this column fall into the same category. It's by Jackie Hunter, formerly of GlaxoSmithKline. The lead-up parts of the piece are fine, where she lays out some of the problems facing the industry. But then we get this vision: In the future, the most effective pharmaceutical companies will be hubs at the center of a network of collaborators and suppliers, focusing internally on their core competencies, which might include medicinal chemistry, execution of clinical trials, or sales and marketing. T... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3802575 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:35:48 +0100 3802575 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3659139&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F06%2F14%2Flooking_back_at_the_genome.php The New York Times reminded its readers the other day about something that people in medical research have known for quite some time: the human genome has not exactly turned out to be an open book full of readily usable data about human diseases. It does make a person cringe to go back and read the press releases and speeches that were made back when the genome was first announced. How about Bill Clinton's statement that the genome sequence would "revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases"? Or Francis Collins, predicting "a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine"? He's got about five more years on that one, but I'm not holding my breath. As I've written here before, though, there was already a deep sense of nervousness among the pe... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3659139 Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:14:50 +0100 3659139 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3526937&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F05%2F03%2Fthe_collapse_of_complexity.php Here's something a bit out of our field, but it might be disturbingly relevant to the drug industry's current situation: Clay Shirky on the collapse of complex societies. He's drawing on Joseph Tainter's archaeological study of that name: The answer he arrived at was that (these societies) hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on. Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each addit... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3526937 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:36:51 +0100 3526937 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3399164&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2010%2F03%2F24%2Fprivileged_scaffolds.php Here's a new article on the concept of "privileged scaffolds", the longstanding idea that there seem to be more biologically active compounds built around some structures than others. This doesn't look like it tells me anything I didn't know, but it's a useful compendium of such structures if you're looking for one. Overall, though, I'm unsure of how far to push this idea. On the one hand, it's certainly true that some structural motifs seem to match up with binding sites more than others (often, I'd say, because of some sort of donor-acceptor pair motif that tends to find a home inside protein binding sites). But in other cases, I think that the appearance of what looks like a hot scaffold is just an artifact of everyone ripping off something that worked - others might have served just a... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3399164 Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:55:46 +0100 3399164 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3071455&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F12%2F09%2Fdrug_companies_since_1950.php There's a data-rich paper out in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery on the history of drug innovation in the industry. I'll get to its real conclusions in another upcoming post, but some of the underlying data are worth a post of their own. The author (Bernard Munos of Lilly) looks at new drug approvals (NMEs) since 1950, and finds: At present, there are more than 4,300 companies that are engaged in drug innovation, yet only 261 organizations (6%) have registered at least one NME since 1950. Of these, only 32 (12%) have been in existence for the entire 59-year period. The remaining 229 (88%) organizations have failed, merged, been acquired, or were created by such M&A deals, resulting in substantial turnover in the industry. . .Of the 261 organizations, only 105 exist today, whereas 137 have ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3071455 Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:22:14 +0100 3071455 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3063462&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F12%2F07%2Fwhy_dont_we_have_more_proteinprotein_drug_molecules.php Almost all of the drugs on the market target one or more small-molecule binding sites on proteins. But there's a lot more to the world than small-molecule binding sites. Proteins spend a vast amount of time interacting with other proteins, in vital ways that we'd like to be able to affect. But those binding events tend to be across broader surfaces, rather than in well-defined binding pockets, and we medicinal chemists haven't had great success in targeting them. There are some successful examples, with a trend towards more of them in the recent literature. Inhibitors of interactions of the oncolocy target Bcl are probably the best known, with Abbott's ABT-737 being the poster child of the whole group. But even though things seem to be picking up in this area, there's still a very long ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3063462 Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:02:35 +0100 3063462 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2999849&cid=t_102238_150_f&fid=35777&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FPharmalot%2F%7E3%2F7PWnZOxv8SQ%2F Who is Thomas Sullivan and why is his name popping up lately? Sullivan is known for a few things - president of Rockpointe, a medical education communications company; a founding member of the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators, and his Policy and Medicine blog, where he rails against government oversight of the pharmaceutical industry. Besides being an avid defender of CME, he is also a vociferous critic of Chuck Grassley, the Senate Republican who is investigating various pharma issues, including CME. Over the past few days, however, Sullivan has been scrutinized himself. That’s because the Drug Industry Document Archive at the University of California at San Francisco released something Sullivan didn’t want made public - his funding from pharma. In a July 6, 2... Pharmalot blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2999849 Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:21:12 +0100 2999849 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2944080&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F10%2F30%2Ffifty_years_of_scientific_history_for_you.php Here's a most interesting graph from the latest issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. It's from an article on trying to discern trends from broad-scale literature analysis, and it's worth a separate blog post of its own (coming shortly). But after yesterday's discussion of whether there are too many graduates in science and engineering, this looked useful. Note, for example, the ramp up in NIH funding in the late 1950s/ early 1960s (a very large change in percentage terms), which was followed by a similar surge in doctorates granted. The late-1990s funding increases seem to be having a similar effect near the end of the chart. Note also the well-publicized drug drought - but the historical perspective is interesting. We've clearly fallen off the 1970-2000 trend line of increasing drug ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2944080 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:50:16 +0100 2944080 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2614067&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F07%2F17%2Fdrug_approvals_natural_and_unnatural.php I seem to have been putting a lot of graphics up this week, so here's another one. This is borrowed from a recent Science paper on the future of natural-products based drug discovery. It's interesting both from that viewpoint, and because of the general approval numbers: And there you have it. Outside of anomalies like 2005, we can say, I think, that the 1980s were a comparative Golden Age of Drug Approvals, that the 1990s held their own but did not reach the earlier heights, and that since 2000 the trend has been dire. If you want some numbers to confirm your intuitions, you can just refer back to this. As far as natural products go, from what I can see, the percentage of drugs derived from them has remained roughly constant: about half. Looking at the current clinical trial environment... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2614067 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:04:13 +0100 2614067 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2571200&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F07%2F02%2Fjargon_will_save_us_all.php Moore's Law: number of semiconductors on a chip doubling every 18 months or so, etc. Everyone's heard of it. But can we agree that anyone who uses it as a metaphor or perscription for drug research doesn't know what they're talking about? I first came across the comparison back during the genomics frenzy. One company that had bought into the craze in a big way press-released (after a rather interval) that they'd advanced their first compound to the clinic based on this wonderful genomics information. I remember rolling my eyes and thinking "Oh, yeah", but on a hunch I went to the Yahoo! stock message boards (often a teeming heap of crazy, then as now). And there I found people just levitating with delight at this news. "This is Moore's Law as applied to drug discovery!" shouted one enthus... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2571200 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:21:01 +0100 2571200 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2341839&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F04%2F14%2Fwho_they.php I try to keep up with the drug-industry news in general, so once in a while I just hop over to Google News and type "pharmaceutical" into the search box. That generally gets me a barrage of press releases, lucky me, and this morning was no different. But what struck me was that basically the whole page of results was talking about companies that either I only vaguely recognized, or (in most cases) had never heard of at all. Raptor Pharmaceuticals I remembered from somewhere, mostly because of that bizarre name. But then there's a run of who-they names: Nanobac merging with Eureka Genomics? Osprey? Poniard? Tekmira? Stellar? Kanion? Optimer? Come to think of it, I actually have heard of those last folks, although I can't tell you much about them. Looking closer, I find that several of thes... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2341839 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:05:54 +0100 2341839 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2341844&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F04%2F07%2Fscientists_running_your_drug_company.php There's an interesting article that showed up in the Financial Times about the leadership of drug companies. Specifically, the number of them that are run by scientists (always lower than you would have thought) is dropping even further. "Only one large western pharmaceutical company will be run by a scientist (John Lechleiter of Lilly) following completion of the current round of acquisitions, in spite of the growing need for strengthened innovation to develop new medicines. . . The changes reflect a shift for the scientists who once dominated senior pharmaceuticals positions to give way to executives with backgrounds in marketing, legal or other more general business backgrounds. The evolution mirrors growing legal and marketing expertise required to operate in the US, which remains t... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2341844 Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:13:31 +0100 2341844 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2163872&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F02%2F05%2Fsir_james_black_vents_therapeutically.php Today I can recommend this interview with Sir James Black, discoverer of propranolol, cimetidine, and more. He's 83 and has a lot to say about the current state of the drug industry: He becomes agitated when discussing a Harvard Business Review article from 2008 by Jean-Pierre Garnier, the former chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, on the future of drug development. He agrees with the prognosis, but is fundamentally at odds over the prescription for change. . . He has no time for classic industry clichés such as "blockbuster" medicines; no truck with the modern approach to peer review; and no patience with any re-writing of history to suggest a more complex contemporary era of drug discovery has replaced one of "lowhanging fruit" in the past. . .He raises his eyes skywards when he discus... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2163872 Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:39:49 +0100 2163872 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2116161&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F01%2F19%2Ften_years_after_the_genomics_frenzy.php So it’s been ten years now since the peak of the genomics craze in the drug industry. Hard to believe! Looking back on these things, it can be hard to recapture the mood, since regretful hindsight keeps blurring the more painful parts. I know that a lot of companies would, in retrospect, rather have back some of the huge amounts of money they spent back in that era, but for every one of those, there’s a genomics company that wishes that they had something that hot to sell again. Well, actually, that’s not true in every case, since several of those genomics players haven’t even lasted long enough to look back from this far. But at the time, at the time they looked as if they might end up owning the world. Not everyone believed that, true, but I don’t remember many people with the... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2116161 Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:49:50 +0100 2116161 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2081337&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F01%2F05%2Fnew_year_i_hope.php In past years, around this time I’ve often done a look back at the previous year in the drug industry. I hope that no one will be disappointed if I scuttle that tradition, because honestly, I have no desire whatsoever to relive what drug research went through in 2008. It may have been the toughest year for industry scientists in the modern era – everyone I know struggles to find a comparison. I’d rather spend my energies on 2009. Let’s just stipulate that 2008 was, on balance, horrendous: what does that tell us? How did we end up in this position, and how can we avoid more of the same? There’s a lot of arguing room in those questions, but I think that we can agree that the proximate cause is that we’re not coming up with enough good drugs. 2008, for all its ugliness, was a han... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2081337 Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:54:46 +0100 2081337 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2053200&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2F18%2Fwhen_placebos_were_all_there_were.php Yesterday's discussion of how to deal with various forms of pseudoscientific hoo-hah naturally brought up several mentions of the placebo effect. And that prompts me to bring in the late Lewis Thomas's The Youngest Science, his memoir of a life in medicine. We should never forget that there was a time, not all that long ago, when drug therapy was almost all placebos. Here's a description of the way Thomas's father practiced in the 1920s: Nevertheless, despite his skepticism, he carried his prescription pad everywhere and wrote voluminous prescriptions for all his patients. TThese were fantastic formulations, containing five or six vegetable ingredients, each one requiring careful measuring and weighing by the druggist, who pounded the powder, dissolved it in alcohol, and bottled it with a... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2053200 Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:48:59 +0100 2053200 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2011546&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2F04%2Fcurse_of_the_lost_compounds.php There are some groups of compounds that seem to have a curse on them. They show up in drug screening, they have activity that’s often too good to ignore, but hardly anyone can manage to turn one of them into a drug. Trifluoromethyl ketones are one example of this. They’re classic inhibitors of proteases, especially serine proteases, and of other enzymes that depend on a serine in their active site. That’s because that ketone really isn’t much of a ketone – the fluorines make the carbon rather unhappy when it’s in that state, electron-poor and ready to pick up a nucleophile and go tetrahedral again. Trifluoromethyl ketones are generally seen in their hydrated state, unless you take care to dry them out, and they’ll work an active-site serine OH into their scheme as well. So y... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2011546 Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:01:28 +0100 2011546 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1975630&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F11%2F19%2Fnovartis_and_reality.php I know that it’s not necessarily fair to drag out old press releases, but let’s do it anyway. Many readers will remember a few years back when Novartis was making its big research move into Cambridge, renovating the old Necco candy building and hiring like mad. (We’ll pause for a bit of somber nostalgia at the memory of a large drug company actually hiring hordes of scientists). While that was going on, there was a lot of talk about the way their research site was going to be run. Under its new research head, Mark Fishman, Novartis would "reinvent the way drugs are discovered" (I quote from an August 2003 article from the Boston Globe, behind their subscriber wall now, which irritated me quite a bit at the time). There was a lot of talk about Gleevec, and how this was going to be so... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1975630 Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:54:28 +0100 1975630 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1809932&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F09%2F19%2Fsunesis_no_substitutions_allowed.php A colleague mentioned to me the other day that Sunesis Pharmaceuticals had let many of its remaining research staff go back during the summer – they’re battening down to try to get their main clinical candidate through for leukemia and ovarian cancer. That’s a common phase of life for a small company trying to go it alone. Clinical trials are expensive, and so are scientists, and sometimes a company finds that it can’t afford both at the same time. Amylin, to pick one example, went through so many cycles of that (starting in the mid-1990s) that I completely lost count. The Sunesis news struck me, though, because if you go back a few years in the literature, they’re all over the place. The company was aggressively investigating (and promoting) a technique called “tethering” a... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1809932 Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:54:05 +0100 1809932 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1458851&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F05%2F21%2Flurching_around_for_fun_and_profit.php I’ve been in this business for almost 19 years now. That means that the drugs that were discovered during my first few years of work are now either on the market or expected to be there soon. Fine, I spent my first eight years at Schering-Plough, so what do I see when I look back? There’s ezetimibe, discovered by sheer chance (but developed by sheer determination, though) and the thrombin receptor antagonist, squirrelly chemical matter from a failed Alzheimer’s program, a compound that a lot of medicinal chemists wouldn’t have even made in the first place. Well, now. This is not a whack at Schering-Plough. Far from it. These are compounds that any organization would have been glad to find, but they weren’t exactly found by direct routes. This is a general phenomenon. You’d thi... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1458851 Wed, 21 May 2008 12:13:24 +0100 1458851 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1429309&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F05%2F08%2Fmerck_bails_on_natural_products.php Every few years, you hear talk of a renaissance in natural products-based drug discovery. Well, this news should postpone the next round of optimism for a bit longer: Merck is cutting their natural products program entirely. They've had a long history in that area, but no more. That C&E News item includes an interesting detail: "The company disclosed that it would also be closing its 50-year-old natural products drug discovery operation based in Madrid after a Merck executive inadvertently included the plan in a PowerPoint presentation to an audience that included Merck employees." Smooth move. I'm sure some interesting e-mails were exchanged around Rahway and Madrid after that one. When, when will we get the powerful regulatory oversight of PowerPoint technology that the masses have cri... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1429309 Thu, 08 May 2008 12:50:51 +0100 1429309 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1303451&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F03%2F14%2Fpen_and_paper.php Registering some new compounds for testing, as I’ve been doing recently, has me thinking about how that was done when I started at my first company. This was in the fall of 1989, so while it’s not exactly the Ancient Old Days, it’s not last week, either. (There are plenty of readers here who go back further). But as far as the technology involved, it looked a lot closer to 1950 than it does to today. For one thing, I saw the tail end of the Bare Desk Era: we didn’t have computers on our desks - at least, most of us didn’t. I found that a bit strange when I joined – not outrageous, as it would have been just two or three years later, but a little disappointing. Some scientists at the PhD level shared computers, but I started out not even doing that. In that company, in those da... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1303451 Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:27:24 +0100 1303451 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1245265&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2008%2F02%2F20%2Fwhat_you_become_known_for.php A recent item from InVivoBlog about Merck which brought up some interesting points. They aren’t cheerful ones. The article is largely about Merck’s reputation, which has taken some dents in recent years, to put it lightly. The Vioxx debacle is the main reason for this, but the hits have kept on coming, such as the latest controversy over the release of the disappointing Vytorin study data. So, although this is a painful question, perhaps it needs to be asked: remember when Merck was above all that stuff? Maybe there should be a “seemed” in that sentence somewhere; that might take some of the sting away. But the company really did have a singular reputation at one time. Depending on your point of view, you could have used words like “insular” or “arrogant” to describe the c... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1245265 Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:14:48 +0100 1245265 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=918139&cid=t_102238_150_f&fid=35777&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FPharmalot%2F%7E3%2F163800066%2F That’s what the the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco Library wants to create. In fact, they’ve already got a small version. Called the Drug Industry Document Archive, it houses reams of studies, government reports, company documents and news articles concerning Neurontin, which Warner-Lambert - later bought by Pfizer - was charged with marketing off-label. Based on their success in creating the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, which has helped legislators, policy makers and consumer advocates probe the tobacco industry, the center now wants to expand the DIDA into a full-blown resource that has endless searchable documents about pharma. Already, an unnamed New York law firm is willing to donate 20 million pages of Me... Pharmalot blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=918139 Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:22:38 +0100 918139 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=883873&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2007%2F09%2F19%2Fthe_good_old_combichem_days.php Yesterday's post set off a discussion of the 1990s combichem boom in the comments. I joined the industry before that took off, and watched it with interest. For those outside the field, combinatorial chemistry was (is, I guess) the semi-automated generation of large numbers of diverse organic compounds. The basic idea was that you'd start with, say, building block A, which would react with a big library of reactant partners B1. . .Bzillion. The resulting compounds would then be reacted with another big set of coupling partners, C1. . .Cmonstrous, and this might be designed to take place out at the end of the B part, or on another part of the A region, etc. There were many pool-split-mix methods worked out to generate the maximum number of different compounds. Various strategies generated ... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=883873 Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:50:30 +0100 883873 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=783898&cid=t_102238_87_f&fid=34867&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thediabetesblog.com%2F2007%2F08%2F07%2Ffunding-boost-for-insulin-gel-caps%2F Filed under: Research, Products, SupportThere's a story running on CNN Money about the progress of Oramed Pharmaceuticals' insulin capsule, which is currently under development. The capsule, taken orally, could provide a more convenient way for diabetics to get insulin than through shots. And popping a gel cap would, needless to say, also be more convenient than toting and blowing on one of those big old clunky Exubera inhalers.In the quest to get its product to market, Oramed needs cash, and lots of it. Answering the call, a combination of private investors are putting up more than two million dollars in financing for the Israel-based company.It's hoped the money will help to propel the insulin capsule through completion of Phase 1 (drug safety) trials by the middle of next year. Said Ora... The Diabetes Blog blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=783898 Tue, 07 Aug 2007 04:00:00 +0100 783898 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=728630&cid=t_102238_149_f&fid=35776&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpipeline.corante.com%2Farchives%2F2007%2F07%2F11%2Ffirst_impressions.php Cambridge takes some getting used to, that's for sure. In some parts of town, it's a safe bet that most of the buildings you see are filled with people holding up flasks and staring at them with irritated expressions. The small one-story sites generally house firms that no one much has heard of, sometimes several of them to a building. Then there are the mighty research palaces of Novartis, Amgen, and the like, which manage to state in glass and brick (as clearly as any words could) what black ink will do for you as opposed to red. New Jersey, where I started out in the industry, has plenty of people in the industry. But the atmosphere was different. Perhaps it was the way that the companies were more spread out into different towns: against a densely populated background they didn't stan... In the Pipeline blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=728630 Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:28:40 +0100 728630