So gentle reader, the ides of August are upon us.  That means that goals slated for accomplishment this year had better be in sight! If you have a clinical candidate in your goals, you had better have your scale-up worked out and your animals ordered for those remaining pharmacology studies and dose ranging tox and PK. If you have programs finishing up, hopefully the screening campaigns are done, so you can order resupply on the hits and you can validate them before the end of the year and have a chance of getting the work done to start on the hit to lead for next year.  If those hit-to-lead campaigns are supposed to move into lead optimization you had better be seeing your primary assay start to produce results that promise the hope of seeing in vivo activity.  That and the annual ritual of filling out your budget like a kid filling out his Christmas list only to have Santa turn into the Grinch and arbitrarily cut 50% off the top.

Ah the Ides of August!

So I want to offer you some help.  If you are stuck optimizing your leads, Victrix can help with structure based and ligand based methods.  If new chemical matter is what you are looking for, we can pull bioisosteres out that will surprise you. Virtual screening, both structure and ligand based can help bring ideas into play that you haven't thought of.  We can help you mine your HTS data and determine false positives and flag potential false negatives for follow-up.  We can build custom PK and tox models to help you out of your DMPK problems.  

It's so cheap, you can't afford not to. Call us for an evaluation.  We will work with your chemists and biologists to give you access to a state of the art computational chemistry and molecular modeling department that uses the same tools as big pharma and the best computational departments with expertise that is the best in class.  I'm sure you are thinking that you can't afford it.  But you can.  You don't need it all the time.  You only pay for access to the tools and expertise you need, when you need it.  Save you head count for another medicinal chemist who can make compounds or another biologist who can generate precious, precious data.  Let us be your computational group.  The only thing you might miss is that sinking feeling when this year’s goals slip out of sight, and you weren't really looking forward to that anyway, were you?




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This graphic roughly shows the structure of the pharmaceutical industry when I joined it in the last gasps of GHW Bush's administration. There were 34 companies that were large enough to merit the title of big pharma.  In that legendary time, Merck was the largest raking in a cool $5.2 billion a year.  Pfizer was number 14 making $1.4 billion a year.  There were many blockbuster drugs on the horizon. I worked at American Cyanamid which was bought by American Home Products.  I left and went to biotech and watched as AHP shed the Cyanamid Agricultural Chemicals business and passed it off to BASF, closing the only agricultural chemical division that was making more money than the pharmaceutical division (Lederle Labs).  The the mass orgy of cannibalism began. As the graphic shows, 34 companies became 7. In 2011 Pfizer had moved to number one with a whopping $56.4 billion in revenues. Merck had dropped to #3 with a still huge $40.1 Billion in cash flow. Novartis which formed when Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz merged.  Ciba-Geigy, itself a merger of Ciba and Geigy. I guess Ciba-Geigy-Sandoz wouldn't fit on business cards, so a new creature emerged named Novartis. 

In the graph below, you can see that 39 drugs were approved in 2012, which is fairly large compared to previous years.  It is important to note that 14 of those were new biologics.  In 1990, 23 drugs and 30 the following year, 1991 were approved.  If you look at the graph at the bottom of the page, one obvious factor is that the cost of developing a new drug (chemical) has risen to $800 million in 2000 from $300 million in 1990.  The best estimate for last year was $ 1.8 billion for 2012.  So where are all those savings that were supposed to come from the consolidation of the industry?  Well, they obviously don't exist. 

One huge problem is that a company the size of Pfizer needs multi-billion dollar earning drugs and those are hard to come by.  They weren't a particularly innovative company so in the 1990s they went on a merger and acquisition binge that destroyed Warner-Lambert, Pharmacia-Upjohn, Wyeth.  All were much more innovative companies than Pfizer.  Pfizer dismantled the research infrastructure of these companies, turning out the chemists responsible for producing the blockbuster drugs, that they acquired the companies for.  Now what?  We have several Brontosauruses that can't find enough food to survive.  As we have learned from the housing crisis, that "too big to fail" translates into "too big not to fail".  The cost savings of mergers are paper economies.  Mirages of accountants ledger books. The industry was in much better health in the late '80s and early '90s that it is now.  What are the big guys doing?  Looking for innovation in the small company arena, buying the small companies, so they can get innovative products and destroy the culture of innovation that brought the new drugs in the first place.  

"Well, what is to be done?" you ask? I'm glad you did.  Fortunately, I am arrogant enough to believe I have the solution.  Tune in tomorrow for part three, in which I solve all the world's problems.