Nevertheless
the author has a lot of meaningful sentences:
“Drug discovery and development is founded
on the premise that it is possible to predict whether a compound will have
clinical efficacy in a disease based on in vitro experiments in cells and in
vivo experiments in animals. Unfortunately, scientists have shown for years
that, while these models have some value, they are not foolproof. It has been
said that cancer has been cured many times in mice. The problem is that results
in rodents don’t often translate to results in humans. Human biology and
disease pathology are quite complex and cannot be easily mimicked in artificial
laboratory settings.”
Another
sentence from the article:
In a recent interview with Nature, Anders Ekblom, head of
Science and Technology Integration at AstraZeneca addressed this process: “The
billion-dollar question is ‘how early can I know that the approach I’m taking will
definitely turn into a drug that delivers exactly what I would like to see?’ A
lot of the cost in today’s drug development is the cost of failures. We are all
trying to focus our energy on how we can get different technologies to better
predict outcomes.”
Well,
really, good
question – how early can I know? How early can I know who wins the next president
election in US? How early can I know the price of gold and oil next week? The
message is simple – to invest riskless and harvest tremendous profit. This is very
typical approach for venture capitalists. They readily bet on every idea trying
to get extremely high profits but 99% fail. It is like lottery and their skills
are pretty worthless. What do you need to win in a lottery? To be in right
place in right time when a winning lottery ticket is selling. Basically –
nothing more.
And another
sentence:
A paper by scientists at Eli Lilly goes into great detail on this topic with
respect to target selection. They believe that “validated targets for drug
discovery are now materializing rapidly” and the attractiveness of many new
targets is enhanced by the availability of biomarkers and surrogate endpoints
which enable researchers to prove very early in clinical trials whether the
hypothesis behind the compound’s activity actually is relevant in humans. This
is an excellent way to proceed and I believe that all biopharmaceutical
companies are striving for this.
Have
you seen innovation somewhere in the last quote? “Target selection” or “target
validation”? Well, let them bet on
these innovations, jack-pot will be increased!
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