In a post called Banning Biotech Paul Kedrosky points to a slide from a presentation he gave last week. The slide compares the number of approved New Molecular Entities (NME’s) to pharma spending over a period of time.
As you can see, the chart shows that all that spending has not necessarily resulted in new drugs. I don’t know the gist of the entire presentation, but he writes
In short, the mapping of the genome, and other such inflection points in this failure-prone industry, has done nothing to accelerate news drugs, while causing costs to escalate dramatically. That’s success?
I would have expected better from Paul. I’ve seen that argument made a lot and you can’t really deny that we haven’t had a lot of success to show for the progress we’ve made over the past decade, but I’d like to stress on that last bit, past decade. Genomics, etc are very new. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and a real impact on drug development is still years away, especially if we are talking about NMEs. The problems stem from a multitude of issues, from business models, from the likelihood that most of the drugs we developed using traditional methods have been solved and the diseases that we need to tackle are hard science, requiring a change in how we develop drugs that hasn’t quite made its way into the R&D pipelines of biopharma companies, and an industry that is in flux as it tries to figure out how to adjust to this new post-genomic reality.
Biotech is such a generic word. What does it mean? Most people use it in the context of a business model, because scientifically, even big pharma is doing biotech now. So what does banning biotech really mean? What we need to change is the dynamics of the industry and how science is done and commercialized.
Biotech and NMEs
In a post called Banning Biotech Paul Kedrosky points to a slide from a presentation he gave last week. The slide compares the number of approved New Molecular Entities (NME’s) to pharma spending over a period of time.
As you can see, the chart shows that all that spending has not necessarily resulted in new drugs. I don’t know the gist of the entire presentation, but he writes
I would have expected better from Paul. I’ve seen that argument made a lot and you can’t really deny that we haven’t had a lot of success to show for the progress we’ve made over the past decade, but I’d like to stress on that last bit, past decade. Genomics, etc are very new. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and a real impact on drug development is still years away, especially if we are talking about NMEs. The problems stem from a multitude of issues, from business models, from the likelihood that most of the drugs we developed using traditional methods have been solved and the diseases that we need to tackle are hard science, requiring a change in how we develop drugs that hasn’t quite made its way into the R&D pipelines of biopharma companies, and an industry that is in flux as it tries to figure out how to adjust to this new post-genomic reality.
Biotech is such a generic word. What does it mean? Most people use it in the context of a business model, because scientifically, even big pharma is doing biotech now. So what does banning biotech really mean? What we need to change is the dynamics of the industry and how science is done and commercialized.
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