Hey, It Makes You Better. Do We Really Need to Know More than That?

Omics! Omics! has a post on recent news from Millennium that "their Phase III trial for Velcade in newly diagnosed multiple myleoma had halted early because the experimental arm was performing so much better than the control arm," writes Keith Robison, who used to work at Millennium. He goes on to talk about the "therapeutic ignorance" at companies involved in drug discovery and development; the biology of what's really going on is often not fully understood even when drugs are on the market. Robison asks, "Will we ever move from incremental, conservative, empirical approaches to some rational, mechanistic hypothesis-driven approach?" In his view, he's hopeful that it will eventually happen, but says that in the near term it remains highly unlikely.