Well, let’s continue the reading:
“Schultz plans to hire up to 150 scientists and staff members who will attempt to transform promising discoveries into potential drugs and treatments that could be brought to market by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.”
Well, so far so good…
Even so, companies like Merck are under pressure to restock their drug pipelines, and they’ve increasingly turned to San Diego for help in crossing the “valley of death,” an industry phrase for bridging the gap between discoveries and new products.
“Valley of death!” Perfect definition! I swear I’ll memorize it!
Many promising discoveries go nowhere simply because universities and institutes can’t raise money from industry or investors for development — even though companies need new products.
That’s it! So simple! Now we know whom to blame - lack of venture capital – the only thing why universities and institutes are not providing the market with a bunch of modern drugs! And now Merck gives the money to those 150 scientists and … and what they will do? Well, I guess that they will start their favorite hit-to-leed music… The modern paradigm is very simple and is presented in the picture. Do you think it is not simple? Even more - complicated? Unnecessary complicated? Well… Probably but it is very rational! And this is the point! You cannot just develop a drug that works – the most important thing is to create a drug with a nice story which is describing WHY this particular drug works. And this of course takes a lot of time and bunch of money! Those $90M is not probably even enough to provide 150 scientists with coca-cola for their meetings, symposiums, seminars and conferences to discuss the latest news about genomics, proteomics, HTS, bioinformatics etc.
Death Valley – what a perfect name for the situation! Valley of rational death.
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