FDAnews Drug Daily Bulletin

Getting Drug Research Really, Really Wrong (In The Pipeline Blog)
The British Medical Journal states that the “widely touted innovation crisis in pharmaceuticals is a myth.” The British Medical Journal is wrong, blogger Derek Lowe writes. An article makes much of Bernard Munos’ work, which shows a relatively constant rate of new drug discovery, Lowe writes. “[The authors] should go back and look at his graph, because they might notice that the slope of the line in recent years has not kept up with the historical rate,” Lowe writes. “And they completely leave out one of the other key points that Munos makes: that even if the rate of discovery were to have remained linear, the costs associated with it sure as hell haven’t. No, it’s all a conspiracy.”