Turning science into medicine. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
Eli Lilly's Chorus unit, established in 2002, emerged as one of the most successful innovations in pharmaceutical R&D productivity, achieving 3-10x productivity improvements over traditional development models…
I am sure many have seen this Y Combinator's Summer 2025 Request for Startups by Jared Friedman. When I founded Icosystem in 2000, I had this exact concept in mind: if we can do analytics and machine learning…
Here is how much increase in P(ts) you get by spending one million US$ in clinical phases and regulatory for 8 therapeutic areas (TAs). This is obviously averaged over many data points (ASPE Drug Development…
As Insilico Medicine has released fascinating R&D benchmarks ( I find it useful to get back to basics to understand the fundamentals. Borrowing from what I consider the gold standard in defining it (2010…
An interesting preprint, Growth vs. Diversity: A Time-Evolution Analysis of the Chemical Space, by a group that has done a lot of work on the concept of chemical space or "chemical multiverse" (a nice review…
Wow, July 16th, 2025 was Gut Microbiome Day in Nature and Science! I am excited to see this Science paper (Controlled colonization of the human gut with a genetically engineered microbial medicine by Whitaker…
Timely article by Xuekun WU, Matthew Wu, James Zou, Nicole Kleinstreuer, Joseph C. Wu: Over 90% of drug candidates that succeed in preclinical animal studies fail in human trials. One (but not the only) big…
Or, evolving on chemical space(s)! The appeal of the concept for me comes from the fact that the topology of a chemical space (the "construction operators") and its boundary conditions are so natural to map to…
There is a lot of excitement in the biotech and pharma world around Eli Lilly and Company's oral, "small" molecule GLP-1R agonist, Orforglipron, licensed in 2018 from Chinese biotech Chugai Pharmaceutical Co.,…
Sergey Kornilov thank you for sharing and for your analysis! Interesting results that point to problem areas and raises some questions... but the results come with enormous caveats. The biggest, I think, are:…
Great post by Ash Jogalekar. Drug discovery is still a prime example of "competence without comprehension" ( we build things that work without always understanding how or why. When a mechanism of action (MOA)…
A recent blog post by the always insightful Elliot Hershberg caught my eye: "AI Versus Eroom's Law." I agree with much of his perspective on AI and how it can impact R&D productivity and value, a timely post…
If you are like me and have been following the rise and rise and rise of GLP-1 analogues and other incretin drugs against obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶f̶l̶i̶c̶t̶ and more, you…
So there is a lot to unpack in Elliot's latest post. To be clear, I am not trying to unpack Elliot but his post . TL;DR: disruption is here, commoditization is coming and the nexus (or nexi, nexuses?) of value…
That's the title of an insightful blog post ( from Alex Telford. China's pharmaceutical industry has evolved from primarily manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to becoming a significant…
Very exciting paper in Science Magazine this week by a Harvard University and Wyss Institute at Harvard University team led by Dave Mooney: Implantable living materials autonomously deliver therapeutics using…
Finally found the time to read the excellent BioPharmaTrend.com report "Beyond Legacy Tools: Defining Modern AI Drug Discovery for 2025 and Beyond" (thank you Andrii Buvailo, Ph.D. for the pointer!). The…
I am an avid reader of @stifel’s @tim opler’s reports. His most recent ( is looking at how AI may change medicine, how the roles of physicians and clinicians may be affected, how tech moats compare to…
It looks that way when it comes to preclinical deals in the obesity/diabetes space. Two weeks ago, I noted that Merck's licensing deal with the Chinese biotech Jiangsu Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. for…
A company like Formation Bio is reinventing clinical development right where it creates the most value: Phase 2, where you show that not only does your candidate not kill patients, it also meets clinical…
Leveraging AI and a partners network, Formation Bio has really nailed the arbitrage opportunity that is coming out of late discovery (pre-IND or IND-ready) to early development (end of Phase 1). Undeveloped…
In the fourth major deal with a Chinese biotech in just a few months ( Merck (MSD) is paying Hengrui Pharma $200m upfront (and up to $1.77bn on milestones plus royalties on net sales if approved) for a…
Pharma & Biotech has the "Magnificent One" The Magnificent 7 stocks (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) currently make up a disproportionate share of the S&P 500's total market…
One of the most unexpectedly and delightfully insightful sessions at DOC, the warm and curiously strong gathering curated by Jordan Shlain, MD and John Battelle on the theme of Truth in Medicine, was the one…
I was struck by a statement I read today about a Techbio company that "uses large language models to create billions of druglike molecules". I have nothing against this company and I think they do very…
The eminently quotable Alex Zhavoronkov, the fearless founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, presented at hashtag#humanx on the same day Insilico announced $110m in funding ( to propel it to a Hong Kong IPO and…
Biotech unicorn Formation Bio's CEO Benjamine Liu had my favorite quote of the hashtag#Humanx week, not because it is provocative but because it aligns with a deep conviction of mine: that the value of…
In a thought-provoking blog post a little more than 2 years ago ($200 Billion in Revenue: How an Aging Drug Will Conquer Pharma, age1's Alex Kesin, Maggie Li and Alex Colville wondered who will pay for an…
Spurred by a conversation with Reid Hoffman at DOC, I dug out Phase II clinical trial success rates (Pts) since the 1990s (I used public data for this as a good first approximation). Here is the trend line…
Ok, this is mysterious. Before drawing conclusions about the speed of exploration there vs. here, I would be grateful if someone could explain Elliot Hershberg's observation. I, too, read the preprint and…
This is a post by Nathan Benaich worth reading for anyone interested in hashtag#AI and hashtag#drugdiscovery. The important TL;DR is that there is a lot to be excited about in spite of the recent failures of…
You can always count on Derek Lowe for an incisive (meaning, with tooth) analysis of a half-baked paper with a promising title ( While Derek focuses on the paper's poorly defined categories (can a target…
I missed this paper in Nature last week, which reports "the discovery of a natural protein, citrate synthase from the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, which self-assembles into Sierpiński triangles."…
Fantastic JPM26 Wing Venture Capital event with the inimitable Rajeev Chand touch! No attribution but a few tidbits: - Immigrants get the job done (tongue in cheek, wonder who might have said that ) - Patent…
A creative tour de force in molecular design in this article "GLP-1R–GIPR–PPARα/γ/δ quintuple agonism corrects obesity and diabetes in mice" by Timo Müller and a team the includes Jonathan Douros and Patrick…
To all the people who are dismissing @emma Walmsley’s tenure and track record at GSK, with a flat stock price and a big revenue dip in 2020, I’d like to remind them of the terribly long cycle of value in big…
This is a cool graph from a timely Reuters article drawing the wrong conclusion: "AI-led selloff in contract research firms may be misjudging disruption risk." [h/t to Andrii Buvailo, Ph.D. for surfacing it!]…
This is a cool graph from a timely Reuters article drawing the wrong conclusion: "AI-led selloff in contract research firms may be misjudging disruption risk." [h/t to Andrii Buvailo, Ph.D. for surfacing it!]…
Another week, another insight-packed report from Tim Opler at Stifel Financial Corp.. One slide that caught my attention compared the relative public markets performances of US and China biotech firms. There…
Much has been written about Merck's licensing deal with the Chinese biotech Jiangsu Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. for rights to an oral GLP-1 RA asset outside of China, with up to $1.9 billion in…
In a fascinating short perspective published in 2013 (Does size matter in R&D productivity? If not, what does?, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery December 2013), Michael Ringel (then at BCG, now CEO of Life…
There were 50 new therapeutics approved by the FDA in 2024, which is the third-largest annual number in the past 30 years with 2018 (59) and 2023 (53) having more. Great overview by Asher Mullard in Nature…
I have recently been on a pharma R&D productivity tear, building modern models to analyze leverage points, including value inflection points (Simon Birksø Larsen). Along the way, I found two posts by Ibrahim…
In an interview for the fantastic Longevity.Technology, Nir Barzilai lists the 4 highest-scoring FDA-approved drugs for humans. It is striking that 3 of the 4 drugs were primarily developed as anti-diabetic…
As Eli Lilly and Company's market capitalization shoots over $1trn again (after reporting quarterly revenue approaching $20bn!) and exceeds the value of yesterday's member of the trillion dollar club…
Thank you Kristen Fortney and BioAge Labs for a fantastic gathering of friends, old and new, with a timely topic: "Extending Human Healthspan: Beyond Weight Loss to Metabolic Resilience." Great timing on the…
Even if not pursuing microbiome therapeutics, Pharma/Biotech should be interested in interactions between drugs and (mostly gut) microbiome. But it is too complex for an industry that is still "throwing sh*t…
Intriguing article by a group at Columbia and TU Denmark Lingby: orally delivered E. coli Nissle 1917, a workhorse of synthetic biology and the preferred chassis in a number of attempts for human therapeutics,…
I am also interested in the impact of a potential elimination of self-affirmed GRAS, as Kennedy and the FDA have been alluding to. ZBiotics has expertly navigated a tight space both with GRAS self-affirmation…
A badly needed article ( reminds us that of ONE of the (possibly large) sources of discrepancy between animal and human studies is the ad hoc nature of pre-clinical studies. Amazingly, most programs lack a…
Now as a sort of counterpoint to "China Biotech Stocks are Diving", there is a secular force at work that looks unstoppable. Still from Tim Opler's report.
That's my favorite quote from Derek Lowe's Science opinion, "The End of Disease". And Derek was kind enough to collect links to all his AI-based drug discovery opinions from the past few years, a treasure…
Antibiotics have been much maligned for promoting resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria and wiping out good bacteria in the gut. While caution is definitely warranted, it turns out that a number of other…
Before Insilico Medicine, Recursion, Atomwise and many others, CoalesiX, launched in 2006, used another form of AI, Evolutionary Computation (EC), to turbocharge the ability of medicinal chemists to explore a…
That's my (slightly clickbaity) summary of this article, which I am sure will reverberate in the haging and healthspan scientific community. To be clear, the inclusion criteria for this (BMI ≥ 25 and ≤ 47…
Always stimulated by Derek Lowe's writings (in spite of an average 50% agreement rate), I tried (a condensed version of) his OpenAI Deep Research prompt on the toxic effects of thalidomide with Perplexity Deep…
A great resource just published in Cell by Cell Press by a stellar group of authors, Guido KROEMER, Andrea B. Maier, Ana Maria Cuervo (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), Vadim Gladyshev, Luigi Ferrucci,…
This timely report (in press) of the American College of Cardiology summarizes evidence and recommendations around Cardiovascular (CV) disease and (chronic, systemic, low-grade) inflammation (CLGI). The…
That’s the title of blog post by @jesse johnson, Scaling Biotech. I believe, with characteristic humility, that the question is ill-posed, even though the framework the author proposes can be useful in…
What has been happening after the publication of Google Quantum AI's paper on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography is just stunning. The story: the Google team and colleagues reached a 10x…
While some bacteria may boost the immune system and drive better immunotherapy outcomes in cancer patients, other bacteria produce molecules that promote inflammation. In fact, the same molecule can be…
This graph is from an article in The Economist on 7/14/2025 (AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?). The first-order interpretation is that traditional search is imploding: people are increasingly…
That’s the title of a great Trends in Biotechnology article led by @the align foundation’s @erika debenedictis. I loved the preprint, I am thrilled to see it published. The Align Foundation is a @schmidt…
Zealand Pharma's decision to "pause" development of its dual GLP-1/GLP-2 receptor agonist dapiglutide due to a lack of clinical differentiation in a crowded obesity marketplace is notable and viewed largely in…
My colleague Germán Plata pointed me to a super interesting "chatGPT" for biology, bioloGPT ( developed by Conner Lambden. It may sound boring -you know, yet another chatbot, or why not use Perplexity. But…
"Validation of L-type calcium channel blocker amlodipine as a novel ADHD treatment through cross-species analysis, drug target Mendelian randomization, and clinical evidence from medical records" ( hides a gem…
Such a transformation in public perception cannot be attributed to a single factor and I would point to at least a couple: (1) A messaging shift in the community from longevity to healthspan: while the former…
A great Quanta Magazine article by Gabriel Popkin focuses on how "crowded" and active cells are: "the packing of molecules into tiny spaces is emerging as a fundamental way that cells have evolved to harness…
In the first week of January 2026, I have finally caught up with Andrej Karpathy: I am overwhelmed. I have crossed a threshold that I don't know how to uncross: I am spending more than 5 hours daily trying to…
The placebo effect (and its evil twin, the nocebo effect) has always been a fascinating topic to me, a miracle to some and a plague to the pharmaceutical industry, especially in therapeutic areas that involve…
Around age 45, I felt like my body was suddenly becoming more fragile. According to an article in Nature Aging on August 14th, 2024 by the prolific Michael Snyder and his team at Stanford University (Nonlinear…
Very cool! Mapping 2,600 previously uncharacterized human proteolytic peptide fragments cleaved by prohormone convertases 1/3 (PCSK1/3) using a computational prediction model, a team led by Stanford University…
The conviction that serendipity can be, if not systematized, at least harnessed for augmented scientific discovery, has fueled my (obviously nonlinear) professional trajectory. As we saw with Fleming's…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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