A very nicely written article (and I don’t say that often!)
And the overall premise is spot on: while it’s a shame that the drugs failed, it’s okay, because we want companies to be taking bets on targets that might result in the next big drug to save or prolong lives.
> In 2026, a BMJ Oncology analysis would give a clinical name to what had happened: “herding.” The authors estimated that nearly 49,000 patients had been enrolled in anti-TIGIT trials by pharmaceutical companies, at a cost of more than $3 billion, all because their fellow pharmaceutical companies were doing the same thing
This is also spot on. I’ve been in the room when people have been infected by this peculiar competitive mania. Rational science takes a backseat to FOMO. But it’s also somewhat understandable: the model we have relies on companies making money to continue to exist and invest in further research and drug development. So of course, they all wanted a slice of the pie, no matter how wrong this was in retrospect. It’s just how the current system works, and it’s the least bad (?) system we’ve yet evolved for such sharing out of resources.
It's just like a parallel of tech venture capital, where missing the next big thing is far more costly than making a wrong bet. No wonder we see herding in tech investments as well.
This blog has the best storytelling of any of the many biotech blogs I read, and is far more accessible to boot. I highly recommend subscribing to it if this interested you!
At the same time we see TIGIT targeted drugs failing, we are seeing the success of drugs against another white whale of cancer drug targets: KRAS.
It's the most frequently mutated cancer activating gene out there, but has been declared "undruggable" for the 15-20 years I've been close enough to drug developers to have heard about it.
Yet we're seeing clinical successes in recent trials with Revolution Medicine's daraxonrasib, and now there's blood in the water, with tons of new approaches going after it.
The progress in biotech in the past few decades has been unbelievable, and lots of things that were considered impossible a few decades ago are now happening left and right. Whenever I hear that somebody thinks that technological progress has stopped, I just think that they've stopped looking in the right places for the huge advances that are going on.
Anti-amyloid drugs work at reducing amyloid plaques. Only problem is that the idea that those plaques are the root cause for Alzheimer's was academic fraud.
A very nicely written article (and I don’t say that often!)
And the overall premise is spot on: while it’s a shame that the drugs failed, it’s okay, because we want companies to be taking bets on targets that might result in the next big drug to save or prolong lives.
> In 2026, a BMJ Oncology analysis would give a clinical name to what had happened: “herding.” The authors estimated that nearly 49,000 patients had been enrolled in anti-TIGIT trials by pharmaceutical companies, at a cost of more than $3 billion, all because their fellow pharmaceutical companies were doing the same thing
This is also spot on. I’ve been in the room when people have been infected by this peculiar competitive mania. Rational science takes a backseat to FOMO. But it’s also somewhat understandable: the model we have relies on companies making money to continue to exist and invest in further research and drug development. So of course, they all wanted a slice of the pie, no matter how wrong this was in retrospect. It’s just how the current system works, and it’s the least bad (?) system we’ve yet evolved for such sharing out of resources.
It's just like a parallel of tech venture capital, where missing the next big thing is far more costly than making a wrong bet. No wonder we see herding in tech investments as well.
This blog has the best storytelling of any of the many biotech blogs I read, and is far more accessible to boot. I highly recommend subscribing to it if this interested you!
At the same time we see TIGIT targeted drugs failing, we are seeing the success of drugs against another white whale of cancer drug targets: KRAS.
It's the most frequently mutated cancer activating gene out there, but has been declared "undruggable" for the 15-20 years I've been close enough to drug developers to have heard about it.
Yet we're seeing clinical successes in recent trials with Revolution Medicine's daraxonrasib, and now there's blood in the water, with tons of new approaches going after it.
The progress in biotech in the past few decades has been unbelievable, and lots of things that were considered impossible a few decades ago are now happening left and right. Whenever I hear that somebody thinks that technological progress has stopped, I just think that they've stopped looking in the right places for the huge advances that are going on.
Anti-amyloid drugs work at reducing amyloid plaques. Only problem is that the idea that those plaques are the root cause for Alzheimer's was academic fraud.