The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it

https://atelfo.github.io/2023/12/23/biopharma-from-janssen-to-today.html

Long article— haven’t read yet but plan to.

 

just skimmed, but looks interesting.
Thanks for posting, @Jaybee00

 

Long, but was worth reading. However, I'm left with a feeling that it might be manipulative, but I'm not sure for whose benefit. Industry? Investors? Not the patients; they would benefit from new useful drugs, but the emphasis isn't on making those drugs affordable. It'll still be supply and demand, and the industry will still try to squeeze as much profit (and taxpayer support) out of it as they can.

 

I agree. This seems to be someone whose love is of making money out of making drugs pining for the old days when it was easy.

My impression is that the old days of trial and error are no longer relevant. These days once we know the target people can make a drug for it pretty quickly it seems. The problem is that the science that finds targets has slowed down.

 

Was a good read, but it's not really more complex than the easy stuff has been discovered, and it's the same thing everywhere.

The next generation of chip fabs (the factories that make computer chips) is expected to cost nearly $30B. That's 30 BILLION dollars for a single factory. Just to build it, it doesn't even account for running it 24/7 for several years. Of course they produce a ridiculous amount of chips but this is the same price tag as ITER, the international fusion experiment that was founded in the late 80's and has a huge international cooperation.

There are critical elements in the software behind artificial intelligence that cost billions of dollars to write, because it's built on generations of prior software and involved thousands of people working for several years. And of course that's also true of the hardware. Without generations of game-oriented computer hardware, at a cost of several trillion dollars of R&D and commercialisation over several decades, none of it would be possible.

The easy stuff has mostly been found, it's no longer really possible to just fool around and make a major discovery. Decades ago it was basically the norm, since it turns out that scientific discovery and technical progress is largely a brute force thing. It's also a lot easier to be in the first group to look for gold on unexplored territory, where it will sometimes sit right there on the ground. After a while, you need some damn heavy equipment to find, refine and process it. Still worth it, but a pick and a shovel won't do it anymore.

 

The author seems to be pining for the days when they found the targets entirely by chance, which is pretty clearly a strategy with diminishing returns.

 

Dropping the regulations wouldn't bring back the days of unexplored territory, so looking back isn't useful.

 

If anything, the lack of regulations probably made it worse overall since it allowed a lot of fake research to gain status. We can pretty much see the same impact with evidence-based medicine and the biopsychosocial model, it's a free-for-all where anyone can say and do anything they want, where ethics are irrelevant, and it produces absolutely nothing.

Doing it wrong to go faster is usually a waste of everything, since it almost always end up with wrong conclusions anyway, and whatever gain was made by achieving them faster is completely lost by the asymmetry of bullshit, since it will take years, if not decades, for the reality that they are useless paths to sink in.