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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | Published online 2 Mar 2016
NEWS IN BRIEF
4 risk allele and evidence of amyloid accumulation. Johnson & Johnson expects this trial to complete in 2023.
Eisai has a BACE inhibitor in PhaseII trials, and Novartis and Lilly both have BACE inhibitors in PhaseI trials.
Asher Mullard
Better screening and disease models needed
Although there have been huge scientific and technical advances in biomedical sciences since the 1950s, the cost of drug development has increased nearly 100-fold in this same timeframe (http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/abs/nrd3681.html
Web End =Nat Rev. Drug Discov. 11, http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/abs/nrd3681.html
Web End =191200; 2012 ). Jack Scannell and Jim Bosley, industry consultants, have now tried to understand these conflicting trends by using a quantitative decision-theory model of the R&D process to explore how the throughput and predictive validity of screening and disease models affect R&D outputs.
Reporting in PLoS ONE, they show that large gains from improved throughput of a model can be quickly offset by small decreases in the predictive validity of a model (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147215
Web End =PLoS ONE, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147215
Web End =10 Feb 2016 ). They also hypothesize that models with high predictive validity are more likely to yield good answers and good treatments, so tend to render themselves and their diseases academically and commercially redundant. The fall in productivity of the pharmaceutical industry, therefore, mightbe partly due to a decline over time in the availability of sufficiently predictive models for...