On 1/10/07, Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Most pharma companies do many things, rational design included. Most pharma companies are also in dire straits, because they can't match the rate of getting drugs to markets in order to remain in positive cash-flow long-term. The bottleneck are typically later stages, most very promising leads wind up duds in animal, or even human testing.
Late stage failure is due more to companies pursuing commercially safe, 'old' targets that they have worked with for decades. Regulatory authorities in the same time have become more stringent. So a side effect profile acceptable in the 70's is not now. I'd expect the newer technologies such as RDD, IT-based pathway analysis, systems biology etc to make things better. In combination with conventional techniques of course. Surely this iterative combo is better than 'hit and miss' methods involving plain old screening. And that too of chemicals that may not 'fit' newer targets at all.
Computational drug design suffered a huge backlash after overpromising and hugely underdelivering. Ditto happened to virtual screening, and even to real high-diversity synthetic libraries.
I agree to an extent. But the backlash is also due to VC's not understanding what they were investing in. The yr 2000 euphoria in biotech was a knee-jerk reaction to the dotcom bust. Adit.
