The Winner’s Curse
Most of us mix up the meaning of Biotech and Pharma since both do pretty much the same thing, invent new drugs. We tend to use Pharma to describe the FIDDCO, i.e. a fully integrated Drug Discovery and Development Company, whereas Biotech companies are more likely to be emergent and on some pathway towards full integration, driven by their own research. But as I remember it, Biotech was originally used to describe the new “big molecule” companies inspired by the early success of Amgen and Genentech from inventing protein drugs. However, when this early success was hard to reproduce, most biotechs stuck to the small classical organic molecules which still dominate clinical practice. This is now changing, as the majors move to acquire or develop a protein drug component for their pipelines. Some argue that we are likely to see protein drugs as 50% of Pharma pipelines, indeed with the acquisitions of CAT and Medimmune, AstraZeneca now has 27% of its current pipeline as proteins and that’s a big change for a company that grew out of manufacturing paints and dyestuffs.
Why is this happening now? No doubt the science has improved and people have gained much more experience in the technologies required to develop and manufacture proteins to the demanding standards required of a new drug, but there are also significant commercial drivers, proteins are expensive and the technology barrier to cloning by generics is higher.
If this continues there will be big changes coming …
Automating Science
Of course scientists try to be objective and rational, but are only human. So when someone says they can automate what scientists do, and the decisions they make, when those decisions are derived from years of study and practical experience, it doesn’t go down very well. So I am going to get myself in trouble and might have to leave.
I think we can automate much of what many scientists do in software. I think that when we do that right, quality improves.
I’ll get my coat.
The Gilman Test
Over dinner the other night, a very experienced Pharmaceutical Industry executive asked me one of those awkward questions people reserve for the second bottle of wine.
“Why is drug discovery productivity so low when so much is spent on new technology like combi-chem, High Throughput Screening, protein structure determination, etcetera, etcetera?”
I said that I didn’t know, because the scientists I meet in Pharma companies are still the clever hard-working, high integrity people they always were. I said I thought that the size and complexity of large organisations and management obsessed with “process change” and “work smarter” initiatives that get people working on things other than drug discovery was ultimately a sign of weakness and was probably part of the problem.
I spent several (wasted) years of my life actively engaged in this kind of large company “strategic change initiative” which meant I was permanently on planes heading to window-less rooms in bland hotels where a group of us middle rank managers would “brainstorm” and “envision” the future, led by some charming facilitator with post-it pads and flip charts, organising us into break-out groups and workshops. It was all very exciting to start with. It felt like being part of the chosen ones, changing the future. It took me a few rounds of this to realise that the organisation was in love with the change process, not the change itself. It got to the point where I could keep the slide pack from one change initiative and recycle them in the next. My contacts in the industry tell me that this obsession with process change continues. I offered to lend them my slide packs from 10 years ago, but I think the jargon needs updating.
I quit when I couldn’t face the thought of another “brown paper brainstorming”. I still have an allergic reaction to flip charts and post-it’s.
Mostly though, I quit because I didn’t think what I was doing passed the Gilman Test.
University Based Drug Discovery
Should Universities engage in drug discovery, as opposed to basic research into the causes of disease? I have often heard it argued that they shouldn’t, in fact I probably said it myself in the years before I found the escape tunnel out of AstraZeneca. i think this is a common view amongst people in the industry, in fact a colleague of mine (an experienced and successful medicinal chemist working in a University) was told by an industry scientist that what he was doing was immoral.
Open Source Drug Discovery
Could you invent a drug for free?
No. It costs on average almost $1 bn to get a new drug launched. Although much of that cost comes from counting all the failures along the way, since for every 150 drug discovery projects that get started only one, 12 years later, makes it to market.
But could you invent a drug without spending any money?
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