The New, Nasty, Normal
This is not a happy column by John Carroll at FierceBiotech. But it's an accurate one. He references the period just a few years ago when Pfizer closed its Sandwich site in the UK and Roche closed...
View ArticleThe Business End and the Science End
Enough depression for now. The last couple of posts have not been cheerful, because there's a lot of not-so-cheerful stuff out there in the business side of the industry. But I wanted to remind...
View ArticleThe Mysterious Origins of the Quinolones
The quinolone antibacterials have over fifty years of use in humans, although the first generation of them was not all that impressive. Most people either don't know where they came from, or will...
View ArticleSilicon Valley Sunglasses
The intersection between Silicon-Valley-style tech and biotech is getting a lot of attention these days. Some of it looks like it could be a productive synthesis: 23andMe hiring Richard Scheller of...
View ArticleCountries That Have Developed A Small-Molecule Drug
Writing about Shenzhen Chipscreen got me to thinking: how many countries really have developed a small-molecule drug with their own resources? I'll go with a medium-generous definition of that - you...
View ArticleLooking Back At Merck/Schering-Plough
Here's Ed Silverman Peter Loftus at Pharmalot, looking back at the Merck/Schering-Plough merger. It has not gone quite like the initial plan: First, a little history. In November 2008, Schering-Plough...
View ArticleHow Many Chemists Have You Seen on a Team?
I'm traveling today to give a talk (at this regional meeting of the AAPS), so I don't have my usual train commute wherein to do the morning blog post. So I wanted to set off a bit of discussion...
View ArticleBest And Worst Areas for Drug Discovery
I'm traveling today, with no time to do a full blog post. So I'm going to toss out a couple of questions for everyone: What diseases or therapeutic areas do you think have the best opportunities now...
View ArticleWhat Are the Odds of Finding a Drug (And How Do You Stand Them?)
Lisa Jarvis of C&E News asked a question on Twitter that's worth some back-of-the-envelope calculation: what are the odds of a medicinal chemist discovering a drug during his or her career? And (I...
View ArticleRecent Clinical Trials
Here's a paper on recent clinical trials in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that reports some changes. It's just concentrating on the trials that began in the 2005-2009 period, and in case you're...
View ArticleRename Merck. Either Merck.
Ed Silverman at Pharmalot has a piece on a perennial source of confusion for anyone outside the drug industry (and too many inside it): the difference between Merck and Merck. One of them gets called...
View ArticleHubris Watch
I like scientific progress a lot. And we've had quite a bit of it in recent years in immunotherapy and gene editing; no one can doubt it. But there still seems to be something a bit off with the quotes...
View ArticleAre Things Really Picking Up?
Is the recent upturn in drug approvals the real thing? Years of overall decline would have to be overcome, but it would be good news if the industry has, in fact, picked back up again. A new article in...
View ArticleThe End of Compound Property Optimization Is At Hand
Here's another Big Retrospective Review of drug pipeline attrition. This sort of effort goes back to the now-famous Rule-of-Five work, and readers will recall the Pfizer roundup of a few years back,...
View ArticleCelgene Expanding
Readers who have worked in the NJ pharma world will be familiar with the big research campus in Summit. I go back far enough to remember it from my first round of job interviews, when it was still...
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