Serendipity and Drug Development

An important perspective on why drug development productivity is declining appeared in yesterday's Financial Times. Authors David Shaywitz and Nassim Talib emphasized the inherent uncertainties of science, and the importance of serendipity in the process (a point made in my book, and what I frequently emphasize in my talks on the subject):

In the face of declining productivity, pharma companies have been trying to boost output by increasing efficiency, narrowing their focus to a handful of disease areas, shelving safe but ineffective compounds without fully exploring their scientific potential and trying to ensure that each project the company is working on is carried out with a clearly defined market segment in mind (emphasis added). Unfortunately, for new medicines in particular, this strategy often fails significantly to reduce exposure to negative uncertainty – all the bad things that can happen during drug development – and eliminates much of the exposure to positive uncertainty (serendipity) that remains so vital.

So intent are managers on maintaining focus that important opportunities for novel discovery are lost, as is the intellectual space for tinkering and capitalising on the chance observations and unexpected directions so important in medical research. Instead, pharma executives are creating an ever-more-rigid environment and then wondering why their productivity is going down, and why they have such difficulty attracting and retaining talent.