DRUG COMPANY PIPELINES ARE FAILING
(Posted 2005-10-12 13:43:54 by Ray Lopez)
It now appears that all of the money, over the last 10 years or so, that
pharmaceutical companies have spent on new drug research and development
have not really paid off. From a 20 September Reuters news story entitled
"US medical research spending rises, results lag," it appears that even
though spending on medical research doubled over the past decade to $94
billion in 2003, the results have been disappointing.
I think it likely that spending has doubled because of the increased
emphasis on pure genomic and proteomic research. Such research is
expensive, requiring everything from expensive equipment to manipulate and
assay genes and proteins on a large scale, to heavy duty IT infrastructures
to sort through and analyze the massive amounts of data produced by such
research. The payoff for this type of spending may come further down the
line, as pharma researchers get better and better at analyzing their data
and focusing on promising areas.
The key consideration here is that the payoff "may" happen. It is not
clear that it will. There are other meta-factors that probably need to be
dealt with before it can be said with certainty that medical research will
advance in some fashion other than fits and starts. I think the biggest of
these factors has to do with the researchers themselves. Most of the big
research organizations in the pharma industry have gotten away from the
pseudo-academic, investigator-centric approach. It used to be that
investigators were more free to pursue what they wanted to in their own
labs. Research agendas were not micro-managed, such that an individual
investigator could choose however he or she wanted to research within a
particular area.
The problem now is that most researchers (particularly young ones) are no
longer free to investigate what they want and how they want to. Because of
the research model used for breaking down proteomics and genomics into
smaller chunks, most investigators are forced into working in an
environment where they have their work and problems defined for them.
This is a sure way to kill innovation. By not allowing researchers a way
to pursue solutions the way in which they like, most big pharmas are
effectively stifling the most important part of their drug discovery
pipeline: The innovation that results from asking new questions, from
looking at things in a different way, from mixing people and their ideas
together and generating new ideas.
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