Tag Archives: pareto law

It’s time for biopharma to embrace public health

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This piece first appeared in the Timmerman Report.

Some years ago when I was working for a large biopharma, I heard a story. It seems a senior scientific executive had visited and given a seminar in which he described the company’s portfolio of drugs for type 2 diabetes. The company was projecting great uptake and profits. A member of our site raised his hand and said, “But if people just ate less and exercised a little more, they could prevent type 2 diabetes and the market would disappear.”

The answer: “Yeah, but they won’t.”

Harsh! But that executive was right. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) recently published a paper in JAMA describing how much different health conditions contribute to private and public health spending in the US. Number one? Diabetes. Following that were heart disease and chronic pain. These are chronic lifestyle diseases with big environmental and behavioral components, and the data make me wonder if there’s an opportunity here for the industry to zig and do some things that, in the long run, may make drug development more sustainable.

I think it’s time for biopharma to get involved in public health. Continue reading →

The power law relationship in drug development

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All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

A few weeks ago a friend and I had the great opportunity to go see Nate Silver speak at the University of Washington. He’s a funny, engaging speaker, and for someone like me who makes his living generating and analyzing data, Silver’s work in sports, politics and other fields has been inspirational.  Much of his talk covered elements of his book, The Signal and the Noise, which I read over a year ago. It was good to get a refresher. One of the elements that particularly struck me this time around, to the point that I took a picture of his slide, was the concept of the power law and its empirical relationship to so many of the phenomena we deal with in life.

Nate Silver graph small

Figure 1: Slide from Nate Silver’s talk demonstrating the power law relationship in business–how often the last 20% of accuracy (or quality or sales or…) comes from the last 80% of effort.

Because I spend way too much time thinking about the business of drug development, I started thinking of how this concept applies to our industry and specifically the problem the industry is facing with creating innovative medicines.

Continue reading →