Most of this post is to share the interesting paper here, The significance of blockbusters in the pharmaceutical industry. Its main conclusion is that drugs need to sell well to repay their own investment – perhaps obvious, but worth demonstrating, all the same.

A while back, I posted this after reading Steven Johnson’s Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, where his elegant construction of the innovations in asymmetric learning were captured this way: We should also not ignore the less tangible innovations: Farr’s mortality reports, Hill’s randomized controlled trials. I think of these as belonging to six primary categories: I think of these as…

It’s not a talent, it’s a discipline

Most companies do it this way, mostly because it is the way they always did it. For any given asset, an ‘indication’ is picked, and then a path planned to that indication. The path will be linear, and typically follow the path of least resistance – start small, gain or lose confidence and hope the stars align for at least one drug per year. To have got there will have involved some prediction….

When Coders bully Doctors, patients lose out…