Pharma R&D Annual Review 2010
Thirty years of tracking drug R&D
...the database was almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of certain individuals...May 1st 2010 marks thirty years since Citeline Drug Intelligence's first pipeline database product, Pharmaprojects, was published. A major innovation, this was the first time that anyone had attempted to collate and organize data on pharmaceutical R&D pipelines. The world in general was a very different place in 1980. The story of how things have changed is not just one of a radically different pharmaceutical industry, but one of unforeseeable changes in the way information is reported and in how the data collected is then delivered to the subscriber.
In 1980, although Pharmaprojects was held on a rudimentary database, this was used to produce a print-only product, redolent of an old-fashioned encyclopaedia. Printed updates were issued monthly, with a complex index system directing the user to the most recent version of the drug entry. It was cumbersome, slow, and used an awful lot of trees. Now, the Pharmaprojects data in its most advanced offering, Pipeline, is not only available online but is updated in real-time, instantly. A neat encapsulation of the technological revolution we have all felt the benefit of if ever there was one.
As for the data included in Pharmaprojects and its collection, this has undergone a similar revolution. With no internet in 1980, company Annual Reports were often the only sources of reliable pipeline information - and they of course only came out once a year. Whilst certain journals and conference abstracts were also scanned (in their physical form, naturally), a major source of information for those early editors were so-called 'Company returns'. Here, a print-out of the drug information held by Pharmaprojects for each company was mailed to it, and the firm was asked to mark-up any updates or changes to be made. These were usually returned to us in the form of handwritten annotations. So the database was almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of certain individuals at the one in three pharma companies who graciously updated the information for us. Now, most companies regularly update their pipeline information directly on their web sites, and various tools ensure that we never miss even the smallest update. Again, the pace of dissemination of information has become instant.
And what of the pharmaceutical industry itself? The shifts have been no less seismic. Although issue 1 of Pharmaprojects has unfortunately been lost to posterity, there were around 1,000 drugs in the entire industry pipeline then - barely a tenth of those seen today. There were also fewer than 500 companies, and those that there were operated primarily at a local level, with few of the multinationals seen today. Rational drug design, high-throughput screening and finding druggable targets from the human genome were great ideas rather than common practice, and we were still two years away from the first drug produced by recombinant DNA technology hitting the market (Lilly/Genentech's Humulin). The pace of discovery since has been astounding and the achievements of the industry manifold. Millions of lives have been saved as a result of its products. And yet companies seem to be continuously in crisis and having to adapt rapidly to survive.
It would probably be very foolish to attempt to speculate on how things will look in a further thirty years. Much has been made of increasingly personalised medicine, but this remains a potentially double-edged sword for the industry - better drugs but with smaller markets. Spiralling healthcare costs, an aging population, more lifestyle-related diseases and further information technology revolutions are all issues which represent a mixture of challenges and opportunities for pharma R&D. Yet as ever, one feels that the pharmaceutical industry will continue to evolve in response to a changing world, and will also continue to have a hugely positive impact on human society.
