No More Stack Ranking at Microsoft
The topic of "stack ranking" came up around here recently, so I wanted to pass on some news in this area. Microsoft, one of the most notorious practitioners, has apparently decided to stop. It's not clear to me just what they're replacing it with, but whatever system they're trying out could hardly be more demoralizing than what it's replacing. Drawing raises and bonuses out of a bingo cage would be preferable - at least then people wouldn't be at each other's throats.
Even if all members of a team performed well that year, the manager was required to designate a set percentage as underperformers — a practice that drew ...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 14, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Kevin Trudeau Goes to Jail, At Long Last
Good news is always welcome. And I can report today that longtime infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau has been jailed on criminal contempt charges, and has another judge breathing down his neck and ordering him to pay $38 million dollars in restitution. This will put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.
Jurors took less than an hour to find Trudeau, 50, guilty of violating a 2004 federal court settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred him from misrepresenting the contents of his books in advertisements, said Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago.
Trudeau, who was jaile...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 13, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Snake Oil Source Type: blogs
Sarepta's Approval Woes
I briefly mentioned Sarepta and etiplirsen, their proposed therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in September. In that post, I made reference to the "delirious fun of investing in biotech". Well, the company recently got some regulatory news that illustrates that point even more clearly. The FDA told Sarepta that it would not get accelerated approval for the drug, and that sent the stock into a mineshaft (and infuriated the DMD community, as you might well think).
Matthew Herper at Forbes has some good background on the story here Etiplirsen is one of these drugs aimed at a small market (one particular DMD mutatio...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 13, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs
Darapladib Misses Its Endpoint
Well, yesterday Reuters had a preview of GlaxoSmithKline's expected release of Phase III data on their phospholipase A2 inhibitor darapladib:
In theory, darapladib could become a $10 billion-a-year seller, industry analysts believe, making it GSK's biggest-ticket pipeline bet.
In practice, there are major doubts about its prospects, after mixed evidence to date, and current consensus forecasts point to annual sales of only $605 million in 2018, according to Thomson Reuters Pharma.
Barclays analysts see just a 10 percent probability of the drug succeeding, which they say points to a potential 12 percent boost to GSK's va...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs
Leaving Antibiotics: An Interview
Here's the (edited) transcript of an interview that Pfizer's VP of clinical research, Charles Knirsch, gave to PBS's Frontline program. The subject was the rise of resistant bacteria - which is a therapeutic area that Pfizer is no longer active in.
And that's the subject of the interview, or one of its main subjects. I get the impression that the interviewer would very much like to tell a story about how big companies walked away to let people die because they couldn't make enough money off of them:
. . .If you look at the course of a therapeutic to treat pneumonia, OK, … we make something, a macrolide, that does that....
Source: In the Pipeline - November 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Infectious Diseases Source Type: blogs
It Doesn't Repeat? Who's Interested?
This report described the uptake of plant-derived microRNAs (miRNA) into the serum, liver and a few other tissues in mice following consumption of rice, as well as apparent gene regulatory activity in the liver. The observation provided a potentially groundbreaking new possibility that RNA-based therapies could be delivered to mammals through oral administration and at the same time opened a discussion on the evolutionary impact of environmental dietary nucleic acid effects across broad phylogenies. A recently reported survey of a large number of animal small RNA datasets from public sources has not revealed evidence for a...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Another Pain Drug Wipes Out
Pain has been a horrendous therapeutic area for drug discovery. That might be because there are a number of very old compounds (opiates, etc.) that most certainly can knock down many kinds of pain, but at the cost of many undesirable side effects. Trying to (1) find drugs without those problems and (2) find drugs that treat other kinds of pain has been nightmarish.
Add another company to the list of blowups in this field. Zalicus (formerly CombinatoRx, which had its own problems) has announced today that two Phase II trials have completely come up empty for them. Z160 was a calcium channel blocker, and it does not work. C...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 11, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs
The Past Twenty Years of Drug Development, Via the Literature
Here's a new paper in PlOSOne on drug development over the past 20 years. The authors are using a large database of patents and open literature publications, and trying to draw connections between those two, and between individual drug targets and the number of compounds that have been disclosed against them. Their explanation of patents and publications is a good one:
. . .We have been unable to find any formal description of the information flow between these two document types but it can be briefly described as follows. Drug discovery project teams typically apply for patents to claim and protect the chemical space aro...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 11, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs
The Other Shoe Drops at Ariad
Ever since Iclusig (ponatinib) (note: fixed that name as an update) ran into trouble with blood-cloting side effects, Ariad has had a huge uncertain cloud blocking out its sunlight. Now that the FDA has told them to take the drug off the market completely, it was clear what was going to happen. Happen it has: the company is laying off a large part of its workforce.
It's very much in doubt whether Iclusig will ever come back. Update: in Europe, the EMA has now said that Iclusig can remain on the market "with increased caution").And if it doesn't, it's very much in doubt whether Ariad will, or how long that might take. Ther...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 8, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs
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 (...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 8, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs
Organizing Research
Here's an article in Angewandte Chemie that could probably have been published in several other places, since it's not specifically about chemistry. It's titled "The Organization of Innovation - The History of an Obsession", from Caspar Hirschi at St. Gallen in Switzerland, and it's a look at how both industrial and academic research have been structured over the years.
He starts off with an article fromThe Economist on the apparent slowdown in innovation. This idea has attained wider currency in recent years (Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation is an excellent place to start, although it's not just about innovation). I sh...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 7, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Who Discovers and Why Source Type: blogs
Now Novartis-Emeryville?
Novartis, again. The company had already announced some cuts at their Emeryville site, but remarks in the comments section (and communicated to me directly) indicate that something even more serious is underway out there now.
More details as things become clearer. And that brings up another item: the Novartis Horsham closure earlier this week appears (again, by comments here and by personal communication) to have not been announced to the rest of the company at the time. A number of people around the organization seem to have heard about it through this site, which does not make a lot of sense to me. When I went with the ...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 6, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
BMS Reshuffling
Damn it all, we just got through with Novartis closing down the Horsham site, and now I'm hearing, from several sources, that something is up at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Tomorrow and/or Friday, word has it, some sort of rearrangement is going to be announced, supposedly with loss of head count. Supposedly concentrated by therapeutic area, but who knows in these things? More details will surely be coming along. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - November 6, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
The Seat of Learning, Indeed
I've got to take my, uh, hat off to this idea. Rebecca Schuman at Missouri-St. Louis, who writes frequently on academic hiring, made an offer late last week that directly addresses the problem that many aspiring faculty members find themselves facing: search committees apparently want bushels of stuff. And the strong suspicion is that they really don't look at most of it - they just want to see you sending it.
So she simply offered to pay $100 to the first two people who submit proof that they enclosed a scan of their butt among their supporting documents. This had to be a legitimate application, and she (wisely) set hers...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 5, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Academia (vs. Industry) Source Type: blogs
Compassionate Access: No Good Answer
Here's a very good look (via the New York Times magazine) at the area of "compassionate use" medications - the practice of allowing desperate patients access to an investigational drug long before it's approved by the FDA. At first look, you'd think that this would be a simple question to answer: if someone's going to die shortly, they should be able to take a crack at whatever investigational drug they want, because what's to lose? But it's not that simple, unfortunately:
But not all companies willingly allow compassionate access to drugs in their pipelines, and ImClone’s and AstraZeneca’s reluctance makes sense on s...
Source: In the Pipeline - November 5, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs
