In the August 15, 2011, issue of Fortune, the story “Inside Pfizer’s palace coup” provided a detailed account of the ouster of Jeff Kindler, CEO of Pfizer Inc. until December 2010. Some watchers of Pfizer’s R&D efforts are victims of several “brutal layoffs” within the company. Others are pharma outsiders who debated with management as to whether there actually was a “Pfizer model of drug discovery” and, if so, the advisability of trying to emulate it. The description of Pfizer as a “dysfunctional pharmaceutical giant” and the drama and politics of Kindler’s ouster came as confirmation that Pfizer was no...

SAN FRANCISCO ‑ I’m enough of a geek that I actually enjoy the details, devil and all, and so I love covering scientific conferences. At the same time, they can be daunting. So much scientific progress is incremental. A case in point: This year’s conference handbook for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) comes to over 1,500 pages, most of them describing minor advances. As I sat in a San Francisco café Saturday morning, simultaneously soaking up the atmosphere and sifting through some of those abstracts in preparation for the weekend, though,...

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How old is our clinical trial system? The first randomized clinical trial was conducted in 1946. British epidemiologist Sir Austin Bradford Hill used randomization to test a pertussis vaccine and a tuberculosis treatment. But according to an article in the British Medical Journal, the concept of randomization was used even earlier, in agriculture experiments in the 1920s. And even before randomization, controlled clinical trials were taking place as early as 1747, when James Lind conducted an experiment in which groups of sailors with scurvy were given various supplements, including citrus fruits. Yet at the recent Foley & Lardner Life Sciences...

Raise your hand if you remember receiving BioWorld Today via that curly fax paper. Seems like ages ago, right? We used a “fax blaster” in those early days – more than 20 years ago – to deliver your daily dose of biotech news. Technology advanced and 14 years ago BioWorld.com was launched. It was a pretty simple site at the start. Since then we’ve made incremental improvements and additions. Today, however, I’m thrilled to tell you that a spanking new BioWorld.com debuts. BioWorld’s indispensable, award-winning coverage of the biopharmaceutical industry continues, but now it’s bigger, better and has more. Take...

SAN FRANCISCO ‑ At this week’s BIO Investor Forum in San Francisco, there was talk of how the biotech industry has squandered money, paying for infrastructure when it should have been paying only for development and continuing to fund programs even when the early data weren’t stellar. I admit it is frustrating to write about companies that are launching yet another Phase III study, because they claim their drug’s “really going to work this time.” And the skyrocketing drug development costs are one reason my fellow Americans and I are paying a fortune every month for health care. During a...

If you walked up to a desk to sign a consent form for an experiment, and the person behind the desk bent down to file your form, and a different person stood up – someone with a clearly different face, different hair, even a different colored shirt – would you notice? As this video shows, 75 percent of people don’t – illustrating a phenomenon known as change blindness. French researcher J. Kevin O'Regan explains change blindness thus: “a very large change in a picture will not be seen by a viewer, if the change is accompanied by a visual disturbance...

MONTREAL ‑ At this week’s American Society for Human Genetics annual meeting, where there is a whole genome sequence there is somebody bringing up privacy concerns. Do you really want your genome data to be laid bare? Will it start in a research database, move to your doctor’s office, and soon enough be found floating around on the Internet? Most of those privacy concerns focus on medical issues, which makes a lot of sense. Certainly, most people would not feel warm and fuzzy about having their insurance companies know that, like Craig Venter, they have a higher-than-average risk of developing...

OK, you’re a biotech entrepreneur and you’ve found some interesting new technology. You’ve secured some seed funding, found some lab space and filled out all the appropriate paperwork for a business license. All’s that left to incorporate your brand new biotech start-up? A name. Coming up with a good name is important. You need a name that speaks to your cause – and is easy to speak. After all, there will be many a presentation in your future, and you can’t afford to lose valuable time on pronunciation lessons. But more than that, a good name is a way to...

Biotech companies raised just $2.8 billion in the third quarter of 2011, according to an analysis published in Monday’s BioWorld Insight. That’s a 60 percent drop from the second quarter of this year, and – just in case you thought seasonality was to blame – a 48 percent drop from the third quarter of last year. On the bright side, biotech fundraising for the first nine months of 2011, at $16.1 billion, is still 18 percent ahead of the $13.6 billion raised in the same period last year, thanks to a strong first half. Another surprising bright spot: although public...