by seanmcgrath
Goldman’s pool for drug research:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

And while we are on the subject of blog posts by Derek Lowe, here’s one where he points to news about Goldman Sachs funding a large pharma company and using a “new” business model

(The model involves) a different approach, creating a “research pool” into which pharma companies would place a range of experimental drugs in a single therapeutic area in early-stage phase 1 and 2 trials, where their specialists would work alongside external experts including scientists, chemists and clinical research organizations.

By the time an experimental drug is in Phase I or II trials, little ‘research’ is really being done. It is mostly development, at least with regard to dosing and such, as well as production methods. The failure rate of drugs at this late stage is much lower than during the pre-development stage, which really is what most people would call research.

But the large costs for drug development comes at the clinical trial stages. So it makes sense for Big Pharma to pool resources here to save some money.

That’s a model that I am sure I’ve heard being mentioned somewhere else, although I can’t remember. The concept is one that does appeal to me in general, but is phase 1 or 2 the correct time? A lot of the attrition occurs in pre-clinical work. Isn’t that the best time to share some risk and make some bets? I still like the idea of a company whose task it is to find interesting drug candidates and connect that candidate to pharma, biotech, academic researchers and funding, or a model where there would be a marketplace that early stage candidates could be placed into and companies could form collaborations or bid for the ability to take the drug forward. This isn’t that far removed for those ideas. I think the distribution fosters innovation, but having someone orchestrating the network is also critical otherwise you won’t get anywhere.

Anyhows, will be following this story and see if we can find out more. A quick google search really didn’t shed any additional light.

Pre-development, on the other hand, is something Big Pharma has not been as innovative at. That can be seen in the areas of research seen in many non-profit research institutions and small biotech companies.

In many cases, technology moves out of basic research facilities at universities and research institutions too early, with a very risky economic future. The pressures of raising money often hampers effective investigation of novel approaches, especially today when almost every small company wants to demonstrate a ‘proof of concept’ so it can sell out to a larger company.

Either the technology should be held longer and investigated by non-profit research institutions (and we see this with some of these organizations moving all the way to production methods) or for a similar basic research pool for companies to fund interesting technologies. Luke Timmerman wrote about one such possibility in Boston earlier this year, Enlight.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by Vik Nanda
Soon it will be time to start over, again:
[Via Scripting News]

Here’s how the tech industry cycle goes.

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn’t cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new systems become popular with “power users” — people who yearn to overcome the limits of the previous generation. It’s exhilirating!

Some of those power users are venture capitalists, they’re hanging around looking for things to invest in, and they pick a few things that look like winners. When I was fresh and dewy, part of the new crop of techies, these people were Mike Markkula who funded Apple, and Ben Rosen who funded Compaq and Lotus. In later generations they were different people, of course.

So the new folks, freshly funded, hire lots of people, young’uns like themselves who are doing it The New Way. They ship some products, and while the users are happy and excited about all the cool new things they can do with the new generation, now that they’re freed of the limits of the previous one, they still want all the features they had come to expect in the old days. No problem! The new companies hire more people and they add all the features of the old generation. Feature wars follow, and the users get bored, and a new generation of techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch.

[More]

Dave has been around for quite a while and he is absolutely right about this sort of innovation cycle. Read the entire post. Complexity is what we fight. But the simplifying solutions are usually inherent in the complexities we have created.

It will be interesting to see what the next cycle will bring. Innovation is always exciting but never more so than when the world is in turmoil.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Web 2.0

Does my sequence have a new homolog?:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an interesting service I discovered during a snoop on the web. PDBalert is a web-based system that alerts users as soon as a pdb structure with homology to a protein of interest becomes available. Users can upload protein sequences of interest and ever Wednesday, when the PDB releases new structures, the service compares sequences to all the new proteins. Simple enough. I suspect many people have their own scripts which do essentially the same.

The thing that jumped out at me was how easy it could be for the PDB to create a service that does the same. You point the service to a source file(s), choose an appropriate algorithm (they could give you some choices), etc. In a perfect world, you could even mash this up with some kind of function prediction engine, etc. The way I see it, more services the better, esp if they can talk to each other. Some day. I still believe there is room in the science space for an API management service which allows developers to build tools upon existing resources like the PDB.

Deepak is absolutely correct. There has to be greater attention to scientific APIs, especially providing users with the abilities to manage these APIs and to perform more complex mashups.

So how about getting a tweet on twitter instead of email, or even have it appear on a Facebook page? Then have it hit pubmed and provide useful papers dealing with the new protein. Why not then directly provide DNA sequence homologies, etc?

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0