Pharma Blog Watch

The State of the Drug Industry (In the Pipeline)
In his blog, Derek Lowe discusses an "overview of the state of the drug industry" published in the Economist. "They start from Pfizer's troubles, which are a pretty accurate summary of what's been going wrong recently," he writes. "Disagreement sets in about whether this is just another darn cyclical downturn, or the death throes of an outdated business model."

The article cites the shift in innovation from chemistry to biotechnology as a reason the drug industry is lagging behind. "Most of the dramatic scientific advances in genetics, proteomics and pharmacogenomics have come not from the industry's cosseted and costly research centres but from academic labs and biotechnology start-ups," the article states.

"That makes it sound as if these fields were some sort of drug bonanza that the industry clumsily missed out on," Lowe writes. "The problem is, those dramatic scientific advances have so far, almost without exception, not produced a single new marketed drug. They don't look to for a while yet, either. Genomics, for example, has been a frightful money pit as far as the drug industry is concerned."