Forecasting Drug Sales: Har, Har.
You're running a drug company, and you have a new product coming out. How much of it do you expect to sell? That sounds like a simple question to answer, but it's anything but, as a new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (from people at McKinsey, no less) makes painfully clear.
Given the importance of forecasting, we set out to investigate three questions. First, how good have drug forecasts been historically? And, more specifically, how good have estimates from sell-side analysts been at predicting the future? Second, what type of error has typically been implicated in the misses? Third, is there any type of drug tha...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 8, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Cambridge "In the Pipeline" Reader Meetup: October 10
Looking at the response, it looks like this Thursday the 10th would work out for a good number of people who've expressed interest, and the weather forecast looks good. So let's try for it then - say, 12 noon?
Now, the venue. I think the MIT food truck area makes sense for throughput and number of options, but there's not much seating around there, or even standing room. The indoor food court across the street is an option for rain, but it looks like we won't need it. Further down, the plaza near the kayak place on the canal has more seating and room in general, but I'd guess that we would overwhelm the burrito place's wi...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 7, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
The 2013 Medicine/Physiology Nobel: Traffic
This year's Medicine Nobel is one that's been anticipated for some time. James Rothman of Yale, Randy W. Schekman of Berkeley, and Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford are cited for their fundamental discoveries in vesicular trafficking, and I can't imagine anyone complaining that it wasn't deserved. (The only controversy would be thanks, once again, to the "Rule of Three" in Alfred Nobel's will. Richard Scheller of Genentech has won prizes with Südhof and with Scheller for his work in the same field).
Here's the Nobel Foundation's scientific summary, and as usual, it's a good one. Vesicles are membrane-enclosed bubbles that bu...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 7, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Biological News Source Type: blogs
An Open Access Trash Heap
Science magazine and writer John Bohannon have done us all a favor. There's a long article out in the latest issue that details how he wrote up a terrible, ridiculous scientific manuscript, attached a made-up name to it under the aegis of a nonexistent institution, and sent this farrago off to over three hundred open-access journals. The result?
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer pr...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 4, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
RSS Readers: An Update
The topic of RSS feeds for keeping up with the scientific literature has come up around here several times, especially since the demise of Google Reader. I've been trying several of these out, and wanted to report back. The Old Reader looked promising, but they seem to have had trouble dealing with the influx of users, leading to a notice a couple of months back that they were basically closing the service off to new users. This now seems to have been walked back: if others have found that they've settled things down, it's still definitely worth a look. I tried Feedly for a while, but couldn't stand the way that it dealt w...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
A Decent Smell, For Once
This is not one of the most pressing topics in the world, but it's certainly on my mind right now. I'm in the process of weighing out a number of acetophenones (literally - the balance is waiting for me over to my right). And I have to tell you, 2-acetylpyridine really smells like corn chips. I think several others in this group also have some of that character, but they're overwhelmed by the sheer tortillachipivity of the 2-acetylpyridine. Now I want a bowl of salsa, and it's only ten o'clock in the morning.
So, fellow organic chemists: what reagents remind you of food? We've talked about things that smell awful around h...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Life in the Drug Labs Source Type: blogs
Astex Gets Bought - At a Higher Price?
This could get interesting: the deal that would have Otsuka buying Astex might be unraveling a bit. Here's what an investment fund with a stake in the matter has to say about it:
We are one of Astex's largest shareholders, owning approximately 5% of the outstanding shares of the company. We believe the recently announced merger transaction with Otsuka Pharmaceutical significantly undervalues Astex and therefore we do not intend to tender our shares.
It seems clear to us from both analyst commentary and press reports in response to the announcement of the Otsuka transaction that many shareholders concur with our view of ...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 3, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
An "In the Pipeline" Meetup in Cambridge?
I've been meaning to do this for some time, and more than one reader has mentioned the idea to me in e-mails. Would the local (Cambridge/Boston) readership be interested in an informal get-together at lunchtime next week (Oct 6 - Oct 12)? The only day that's out for me is Wednesday, October 9th, otherwise my schedule looks like can take whatever comes.
My guess for somewhere to congregate might be the line of food trucks near MIT, but other suggestions are welcome. This will depend on the weather, of course, which is unknowable at this point. But if you're interested and have a preference for which days might work, leave ...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs
Man, That's A Lot of New Public Companies
Did you know that thirty-eight biotech companies have gone public this year? I knew there were a lot of them, but I didn't realize that the number was that high. The most recent one, Fate Therapeutics, didn't quite go off the way it was hoped to. At some point, the music has to stop, and what everyone seems to be wondering is whether that was the sound of a violin case closing or not. Do you feel like investing in the thirty-ninth IPO of the year? How about the forty-seventh? It's only October, you know, and that's always been a great month for the stock. . .oh, never mind. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Results From the JACS Challenge
The first results are in for the "JACS Challenge" that I mentioned here the other day. It looks like people's picks did correlate with later citation counts, overall, but with some curious exceptions. Some things that looked as if they would have been referred to a lot weren't, such as a paper on solventless polymerization. And a paper on transition-metal catalyzed boron-nitrogen bond formation was only picked by two respondents, but has amassed 258 citations since it was published. For the most part, though, people tended to judge the past pretty well (here's the PDF with all the statistics, if you're interested). (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 2, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Merck Cuts Back. Way Back.
I've been stuck underground on a stalled subway train, but the rumor that was passed on to me last night turns out to be true: Merck is doing some big, serious cuts. They're cutting back about 20% worldwide, and it's going to hit every part of the company. More details as they become available. . . (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - October 1, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Tramadol Turns Out to Be a Natural Product
Every so often reports appear that some synthetic compound actually turns out to be a natural product. Sometimes these make very little sense, and turn out to be analytical mistakes (as with this report of nevirapine). But sometimes they're right.
This one looks as if it's right, though. Nauclea latifola, known colloquially as the "African peach", apparently has tramadol in it. That's pretty interesting, since tramadol was previously known as a synthetic opioid agonist (among other activities), used as an analgesic since the 1970s. Fittingly, preparations from this same species show up in a number of traditional medicine ...
Source: In the Pipeline - October 1, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Natural Products Source Type: blogs
A War On Expertise?
I see that Popular Science is shutting down the comments function on their web site. Like a lot of news organizations, I think that their signal/noise was pretty low in the comments. (And that prompts me to express, again, my appreciation for the commenters on this blog - one of the first questions I get when I talk to anyone else who runs a web site is how on Earth the comments section around here stays so readable and sane!)
They're citing some experiments that seem to show that fractious comments sections actually make the original posts above them seem less reliable, and that may be how it works. In reality, my impres...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 30, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: General Scientific News Source Type: blogs
They'll Fake the Journal if You'll Fake the Papers
The Economist has a disturbing article on the extent of academic publishing fraud in China. It's disturbing that it goes on so much, and should be disturbing that it's in The Economist:
DISGUISED as employees of a gas company, a team of policemen burst into a flat in Beijing on September 1st. Two suspects inside panicked and tossed a plastic bag full of money out of a 15th-floor window. Red hundred-yuan notes worth as much as $50,000 fluttered to the pavement below.
Money raining down on pedestrians was not as bizarre, however, as the racket behind it. China is known for its pirated DVDs and fake designer gear, but these...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 30, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
A Phase III Failure at Eli Lilly. Yes, Again.
In case you didn't see it yesterday, Eli Lilly had yet another nasty Phase III failure. This one was ramucirumab against breast cancer (one of the Imclone projects). This was (yet again) one of the compounds that's supposed to be shoring the company up as it continues to lose patent protection on its existing drugs, and it's losing a lot of that.
I'm not going to focus on this particular antibody, but rather a larger issue. Here it is, outlined by FierceBiotech:
The crucial late-stage failure--ramucirumab has been considered one of the pharma giant's top Phase III prospects--scuttles one of Eli Lilly's chief near-term ho...
Source: In the Pipeline - September 27, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
