News & Comment

Between 2000 and 2010, Pfizer racked up three of the ten largest biopharmaceutical deals of all time, with a US$90 billion acquisition of Warner-Lambert, a $60 billion merger with Pharmacia and a $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth. The last deal, especially, was aimed at bolstering Pfizer’s flagging pipeline and protecting its revenue base from an upcoming patent cliff. More than a decade on — having walked away from an attempted takeover of AstraZeneca and a merger with Allergan — the company is celebrating an R&D turnaround. Pfizer CSO Mikael Dolsten has overhauled the firm’s scientific approach, focusing on five therapeutic areas, halving the number of candidates the company has in the clinic, and expanding its modality capabilities beyond the small molecules it used to focus on. And he believes the results are in: Pfizer’s phase II success rate has tripled in recent years, he said at a recent investor day. Dolsten spoke with Asher Mullard about Pfizer’s clinical success rate, its focus on speedy drug development and its approach to modality expansion in recent years.

Digital health technologies have the potential to help address some of the challenges in the clinical development of drugs for central nervous system disorders. This article discusses strategies for the development of such tools in the context of the European regulatory environment.

Seres Therapeutics’ stool-derived treatment for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection could become the first FDA-approved microbiome therapy. Several other live biotherapeutic microbial products are close behind.

Sanofi and others are testing whether trispecific antibodies might have applications in cancer and infectious disease indications.

Computational chemistry is already embedded in the drug discovery process. Schrödinger — a company that was founded more than 30 years ago to develop chemical simulation software for biopharmaceutical partners — believes that it should be more foundational still. Having co-founded several biotechs in the past decade, including Nimbus Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutics, Schrödinger launched its own drug discovery pipeline in 2018 to expand this model. Heading up that effort is Schrödinger Chief Biomedical Scientist Karen Akinsanya. A pharmacologist by training, Akinsanya has more than 20 years industry experience working at the bench, the bedside and then in the boardroom. She now goes back to her research roots, leading the screening of hundreds of billions of compounds against targets of interest. She spoke with Asher Mullard about Schrödinger’s physics-based approach to computational chemistry, the bottlenecks in this approach, and the new opportunities it can open up.