Over at bbgm, Deepak Singh considers a slide that's been circulating which compares the number of approved New Molecular Entities to spending by members of PhRMA from 1970 to the early 2000s. Paul Kedrosky, who presented the slide recently, notes that "the mapping of the genome, and other such inflection points in this failure-prone industry, has done nothing to accelerate [new] drugs, while causing costs to escalate dramatically."
Singh takes him to task for the comment. "I’ve seen that argument made a lot and you can’t really deny that we haven’t had a lot of success to show for the progress we’ve made over the past decade, but I’d like to stress on that last bit, past decade. Genomics, etc are very new," he writes. "We’ve barely scratched the surface, and a real impact on drug development is still years away, especially if we are talking about NMEs."