Exiting Two Therapeutic Areas

So Bristol-Myers Squibb did indeed re-org itself yesterday, with the loss of about 75 jobs (and the shifting around of 300 more, which will probably result in some job losses as well, since not everyone is going to be able to do that). And they announced that they're getting out of two therapeutic areas, diabetes and neuroscience. Those would be for very different reasons. Neuro is famously difficult and specialized. There are huge opportunities there, but they're opportunities because no one's been able to do much with them, for a lot of good reasons. Some of the biggest tar pits of drug discovery are to be found there (Alzheimer's, chronic pain), and even the diseases for which we have some treatments are near-total black boxes, mechanistically (schizophrenia, epilepsy and seizures). The animal models are mysterious and often misleading, and the clinical trials for the biggest diseases in this area are well-known to be expensive and tricky to run. You've got your work cut out for you over here. Meanwhile, the field of diabetes and metabolic disorders is better served. For type I diabetes, the main thing you can do, short of finding ever more precise ways of dosing insulin, is to figure out how to restore islet function and cure it, and that's where all the effort seems to be going. For type II diabetes, which is unfortunately a large market and getting larger all the time, there are a number of therapeutic options. And while there's probably room for still more, the fiel...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs