Friday's post has brought in a lot of comments, and they're still piling up. I wanted to address a few of the more frequent ones, though, out here on the front page.

First off, the idea that a bunch of stock analysts could have a useful opinion on a pharma company's return on investment doesn't seem to strike many people as plausible. Variations on "What do they know about this business?" and "Aren't these the same geniuses that wiped out the mortgage bond market?" have come up numerous times. My answer to the latter is no, they aren't. The stock and industry analysts are a different bunch entirely. That's not to say that they can't be stupid, or make mistakes (they do!) But these aren't the people who thought that they had all the risks figured for interest-rate swaps and collateralized debt obligations. If you have disagreements with industry analysts, then you should fight in their territory.

There's more substance to the "What do they know" objection, but still (in my view) not enough. What they know is what's been made public, of course, and as we in the industry know, that's not everything. But that doesn't make Wall Street's case any weaker this time, as far as I can tell. Morgan Stanley and their ilk are not missing any of the successful projects from inside big pharma - those all get aired out thoroughly. If they're short on data, it's on how many projects fail, and how much they cost, and those numbers aren't going to make the ROI look any better. Meanwhile, most all the inlicensed compounds actually get announced, since they're material transactions for someone, so far fewer of those escape notice. I don't like the Morgan Stanley point of view, not at all, but dislike is not a refutation.

Another thing to remember is that the people with the best figures on ROI are the upper management of the companies involved, and these are the people who are slashing head count and outsourcing wherever they can. And we have to make a distinction here, between diagnosis and treatment. We can disagree on whether this is the proper response (although I'm kind of stuck for alternatives), but is it still possible to argue that these CEOs and the like are reacting to something that isn't there? Something is precipitating a lot of large, painful, and nasty decisions, and I think that it's probably the very concerns about cost that we've been talking about. We need to separate the argument about whether those figures are real from the argument about what's been done in response.

Well, I have no particular need to make azo-linked compounds (see this morning's post for one reason!). And I have to say, although it's mechanistically interesting, I definitely feel no desire to make them by combining a hydroperoxide and a diazonium salt in one pot. This is not a moment destined to take its place alongside the legendary invention of the chocolate/peanut butter cup.

There's an article out from a group in Australia on the long-standing problem of "frequent hitter" compounds. Everyone who's had to work with high-throughput screening data has had to think about this issue, because it's clear that some compounds are nothing but trouble. They show up again and again as hits in all sorts of assays, and eventually someone gets frustrated enough to flag them or physically remove them from the screening deck (although that last option is often a lot harder than you'd think, and compound flags can proliferate to the point that they get ignored).

The larger problem is whether there are whole classes of compounds that should be avoided. It's not an easy one to deal with, because the question turns on how you're running your assays. Some things are going to interfere with fluorescent readouts, by absorbing or emitting light of their own, but that can depend on the wavelengths you're using. Others will mung up a particular coupled assay readout, but leave a different technology untouched.

And then there's the aggregation problem, which we've only really become aware of in the past few years. Some compounds just like to stick together into huge clumps, often taking the assay's protein target (or some other key component) with them. At first, everyone thought "Ah-hah! Now we can really scrub the screening plates of all the nasties!", but it turns out that aggregation itself is an assay-dependent phenomenon. Change the concentrations or added proteins, and whoomph: compounds that were horrible before suddenly behave reasonably, while a new set of well-behaved structures has suddenly gone over to the dark side.

This new paper is another attempt to find "Pan-Assay Interference" compounds or PAINs, as they name them. (This follows a weird-acronym tradition in screening that goes back at least to Vertex's program to get undesirable structures out of screening collections, REOS, for "Rapid Elimination of, uh, Swill"). It will definitely be of interest to people using the AlphaScreen technology, since it's the result of some 40 HTS campaigns using it, but the lessons are worth reading about in general.

What they found was that (as you'd figure) that while it's really hard to blackball compounds permanently with any degree of confidence, the effort needs to be made. Still, even using their best set of filters, 5% of marketed drugs get flagged as problematic screening hits - in fact, hardly any database gives you a warning rate below that, with the exception of a collection of CNS drugs, whose properties are naturally a bit more constrained. Interestingly, they also report the problematic-structure rate for the collections of nine commercial compound vendors, although (frustratingly) without giving their names. Several of them sit around that 5% figure, but a couple of them stand out with 11 or 12% of their compounds setting off alarms. This, the authors surmise, is linked to some of the facile combinatorial-type reactions used to prepare them, particularly ones that leave enones or exo-alkenes in the final structures.

So what kinds of compounds are the most worrisome? If you're going to winnow out anything, you should probably start with these: Rhodanines are bad, which doesn't surprise me. (Abbott and Bristol Myers-Squibb have also reported them as troublesome). Phenol Mannich compounds and phenolic hydrazones are poor bets. And all sort of keto-heterocycles with conjugated exo alkenes make the list. There are several other classes, but those are the worst of the bunch, and I have to say, I'd gladly cross any of them off a list of screening hits.

But not everyone does. As the authors show, there are nearly 800 literature references to rhodanine compounds showing biological effects. A conspicuous example is here, from the good folks at Harvard, which was shown to be rather nonspecifically ugly here. What does all this do for you? Not much:

"Rather than being privileged structures, we suggest that rhodanines are polluting the scientific literature. . .these results reflect the extent of wasted resources that these nuisance compounds are generally causing. We suggest that a significant proportion of screening-based publications and patents may contain assay interference hits and that extensive docking computations and graphics that are frequently produced may often be meaningless. In the case of rhodanines, the answer set represents some 60 patents and we have found patents to be conspicuously prevalent for other classes of PAINS. This collectively represents an enormous cost in protecting intellectual property, much of which may be of little value. . ."

I hate to do another post on this subject, after a good part of the week has been devoted to layoff news and the like, but this one is too much to ignore. A reader sent along this link, which quotes a Morgan Stanley appraisal of the pharma industry as an investment. Here's what they're telling their clients:

". . .Still significant value in Pharma - we see material upside to ROIC [return on invested capital], earnings and multiples as Pharma withdraws from most internal small-molecule research and reallocates capital to in-licensing and other non-pharma assets. Worsening generic pressure and R&D management changes lead us to expect material cuts to internal small research spend (~40% total R&D) in 2010/11, after a decade of dismal internal R&D returns. We expect AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis to be among the leaders in externalizing research, and this is a key driver of our upgrade of AstraZeneca today to Overweight.

Reinvestment of internal research savings into in-licensing will yield three times the likely return, we calculate. Under in-licensing deals, downside risk for pharma companies is currently materially lower than for internally developed drugs. Although upside is also capped by pay-aways and milestone obligations, the net present value of these payments is more than offset by the lower risk-adjusted invested capital. Over one-third of pharma R&D spend is in pre-phase II, where the probability of reaching the market is <10%. our proprietary analysis indicates that, unless the probability of an in-house molecule reaching the market is 30% or more, the risk-adjusted economic value added, or eva, is three times higher under the external research model, with a greater predictability."

It could be said in fewer words, but it's all there. If you're looking for the reason the big companies are doing what they're doing, look no further. Agree with it or not, there's a case to be made - and there's Morgan Stanley, making it - that the cost of running new drug projects in big pharma is just too high relative to the risks of failure. Those returns, in fact, are calculated to be off by a factor of three.

You may not believe that factor, and I have to say, I found it hard to believe myself. But let's say the Morgan Stanley folks have their numbers off. Perhaps it's only twice as profitable to bring in outside drugs as it is to develop them internally. Don't believe that one, either? Maybe it's only 25% more profitable - can you imagine making a move that would increase your company's return on investment by 25%? Industries get remade by such changes at the margin, and this one is remaking ours. Why do we have any internal R&D left at all, if those figures are anywhere near right?

Well, no one's tried to run a large company entirely by in-licensing, and I think that there are a lot of reasons why that wouldn't work. (For one thing, I don't think that there are enough things to in-license, and if one or more large companies announced that they were doing that exclusively, the price of each deal would go right up). And there needs to be some internal expertise left, if only to evaluate those external drug candidates to make sure you're not being taken. But still. All this means is that internal R&D will stay around, but it has to get cheaper and will very likely get smaller.

We can argue about the assumptions behind all this, but there's no doubt that a compelling business case can be made for this world view. Anyone who wants to argue differently - and a lot of us do - will have to come up with solid numbers and reasoning for why it just ain't so. I'm not sure such numbers exist.

There are many corollaries to this line of thought. One of them - and I hate to bring this up, considering all the horrible layoff news recently - is that one of the most psychologically comforting theories that we in R&D have for our present fix is likely wrong. I refer to the "Evil Clueless MBA CEO" theory, which has its satisfactions, but is a hazardous way to think. It is always dangerous to assume that people who do things you disagree with are doing them because they're just idiots or because they're innately malicious. In general, I'd say that the first explanation to jettison is malice, followed by stupidity (Hanlon's Razor). What that leaves you with is that these actions, stupid and malicious though they may appear, are probably being done for reasons that appear valid to the people doing them. I know, I know - some of these reasons are things like "So I can keep my high-paying CEO job", and we can't ignore that one. But a good way to lose a high-paying CEO job is to try to tell your board of directors (and your shareholders) why you're going to pass up an opportunity to get three times your ROIC.

Another thing to think about is, if these cost estimates are right, how did we get here? The best reason I can think of for such a disparity is that small companies (the source of these in-licensed drugs and projects) are often betting their entire existence on these ideas. They are very strongly motivated to do whatever they can do to get them to work (sometimes a bit too motivated, but that risk is already factored in), and if things don't pan out, they usually disappear. Basically, the in-licensing world unloads the risk from the large pharma company (and its shareholders) onto the investors in the smaller ones. The cost disparity will exist for as long as people are willing to back smaller companies. Now, this isn't to say that the big companies are always going to do a great job picking what to bring in. We've been talking a lot, for example, about the GSK-Sirtris deal, and that one may or may not work out. But the idea of doing big in-licensing deals in general - that's a different story, no matter how any individual company manages to execute it.

What that also means is that more of us are going to end up working for those smaller companies (which is something that I, and several commenters around here, have been saying for a while). If the large pharma outfits are going to devote more money to in-licensing, there will then be more opportunities for people developing things for them to in-license. The rough part is that all these structural changes in the drug industry are taking place (largely by coincidence, I think) during economic conditions which make funding such companies difficult.

And then there's the internal cost-cutting, for the R&D that's actually staying at the big companies. That, of course, generally means sending a lot of it to China, or wherever else it can be done more cheaply. And that's going to continue as long as it can indeed be done more cheaply, which means "not forever". Costs are already rising in China and India, although they have a good ways to go before they catch up to the US and Europe. I know that we can argue about how well that whole idea is going to work - there are clearly inefficiencies to doing a lot of your work through outsourcing, but as long as those don't eat up all the cost savings, it's still going to keep happening.

This, as a side note, is why I think that one of the suggestions that gets floated here in the comments from time to time, the idea of forming a "medicinal chemist's union", is completely useless. Unions form when workers have the leverage to preserve a higher-cost business model. In the end, the big industrial concerns of the early 20th century had to have workers, and they had to have them in certain locations, so the unions always had the threat of going on strike. At attempt to lower the boom under these conditions would result in everything going to China, and damned quickly.

So. . .what's happening to us, and to our industry, is not really mysterious. Our cost structure does not look to be supportable, and since there are cheaper alternatives that appear to be feasible, those will get tried. The disruption and destruction that all this is causing is real, of course. But the best I can offer is to try to understand what's driving all this upheaval, because that might help people to figure out how to protect their own jobs or where to jump next. Everyone has to give this some serious thought, because I don't see any reason why all this won't keep going on for some time to come.

On another front, we now have an ex-BMS associate scientist who's apparently been arrested for stealing company materials in preparation for starting his own company back in India. I presume he was planning to get into the advanced pharmaceutical intermediates business (or perhaps the biotech end of it), using as much proprietary information as he could download in order to get a quick leg up. The company's security folks seem to have flagged him over the Christmas break, and he's since been spending time with the FBI. . .

The hits just keep on coming. Bristol-Myers Squibb told its employees yesterday that there will be no pay increases this year, and from what I'm hearing, this took a lot of people completely by surprise. As late as last week, there was apparently still discussion of what the salary increases would be for various performance ratings and that sort of thing, but no more.

This sort of thing may or may not be a sign of imminent bad news, but it's never a sign of good news. We'll see what happens as the company continues to deal with the oncoming Plavix patent expiration and other issues. . .

I'll start a post here so those with details on today's GlaxoSmithKline news can leave comments. I assume we'll be hearing from the UK folks shortly, and the US more in the middle of the day. I also wonder if these announcements will be like the AstraZeneca one earlier - that is, cuts to be staged over a longer period. Those are a mixed bag. They keep people employed longer (and give them some hope that there may be a place to go by the time their position gets cut), but it also spreads Morale-B-Gone dust over a place for an extended time.

Good luck to all concerned.

Looking through the latest papers to show up in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, this one on BACE-1 inhibitor compounds caught my eye. Perhaps I'm about to be unfair to it. At any rate, I'm going to ask of it something it doesn't provide: data in something that's alive. Doesn't have to be a person, a dog, or even a rat. A cell would do: something with a membrane to cross, with metabolic processes, and with the ability to accept or reject someone's new compound. Enzymes just have to sit there and take whatever you throw at them; living systems fight back.

I sometimes think that we'd be better served if each of the medicinal chemistry journals were split. In J. Med. Chem.'s case, we would then have the Journal of In Vitro Medicinal Chemistry and the Journal of In Vivo Medicinal Chemistry. The criteria for publishing in the two journals would be exactly the same, except to get into the latter one, you would have at least had to have tried your compounds out on something besides an in vitro assay. Doesn't mean that they have to have worked - you just have to have looked.

Although the case of compounds with molecular weights of 900 that have four amides and a sulfonamide in them, and are directed against a target in the central nervous system, might still be a bit of a stretch. I supposed what irritates me about this paper is that it starts off talking about Alzheimer's disease. And that's natural enough in a study dedicated to finding inhibitors of BACE-1, but the problem is, Alzheimer's disease occurs in human beings. And these compounds do not look to have much chance of doing anything inside any human's body. The best I can say for them is that they might give someone else an insight into something that they might be able to do to make something that might have a better chance of working.

Cranky folks like me would probably refer to the latter of my two new journals as just "J. Med. Chem.", and would refer to the former one by a variety of other easy-to-remember names. I offer this suggestion for free to the scientific publishing community, who will, I'm sure, reciprocate with things of equal value.

Dimebon (dimebolin) is a perfect example of the black-box nature of drug research for the central nervous system. Any medicinal chemist who looks at its structure would immediately say "CNS", but shrug when asked what specific receptors it might hit. I'd have guessed histamine (correctly), since loratidine used to pay my salary, and I also would have guessed a clutch of 5-HT stuff as well. But it also has activity at AMPA and NMDA glutamate receptors, L-type calcium channels, and more. If you can tell me what it's really doing up there, you shouldn't bother: hang up on me and start calling people with money, because you're ready to take over the CNS therapeutic area for sure.

This blunderbuss is getting a lot of attention these days, since the data for a Phase III trial against Alzheimer's should be available sometime in the spring. The road to that was a strange one. Dimebolin was used for years as an antihistamine in Russia, although I'm not aware if it had any particular reputation for cognitive enhancement in its time as a Soviet allergy pill. It was picked up in screening done during the 1990s at a research institute in the (once secret) military/industrial research city of Chemogolovka Chernogolovka, about two hours from Moscow. It showed effects on learning in rodent models, and gradually advanced to human trials for Alzheimer's. Impressive data came out in 2008, and Medivation, who own the rights to it here, partnered with Pfizer for development.

Update: the city mentioned above is surely Chernogolovka, but it's interesting that it's appeared many times as Chemogolovka in the English press and literature. I chalk that up to the "rn" looking very much like an "m", and to the mistaken name being semi-plausible in a Stalinist-industrial way, as witness Magnitogorsk. Chernogolovka's much older, though.)

That Bloomberg report I linked to above has a lot of people excited, since there hasn't been a new therapy for Alzheimer's in quite a while (or, arguably, a decent one ever). I don't know what to think, myself. It's absolutely possible that the drug could turn out to have beneficial effects, but it's just as possible that it could miss meeting the high expectations that many investors seem to have for it. (Medivation's stock is up 80% over the last year, for example). A lot of eye-catching numbers from small Phase II trials tend to flatten out in the wider world of Phase III, and if forced, that's the way I'd bet here. (I am most definitely not giving investment advice, though - Alzheimer's drug development is a total crap shoot, and should only be approached with money you can afford to see incinerated).

I hope that Dimebon actually works, though - the world could use something that does. Just don't let anyone convince you that they know how it works, if it makes it through. Unraveling that will take quite a while. . .

So, now that we're in 2010, the journal that introduced the whole idea of a graphical abstract to organic chemistry (Tetrahedron Letters) has finally started including them in their RSS feed. That's how I read journals these days, and I think I have a lot of company, so I'm grateful that they got around to it.

And on another literature note, I wanted to mention that I've accepted an invite to the editorial advisory board of the new ACS journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. You can tell, I guess, when you've been doing this stuff for a while - when I look at the rest of the advisory board, I see people I went to grad school with, people I used to work down the hall from, and so on. The journal has started publishing its first papers; we'll see how it works out, and how it competes with the other short-form outlet for this sort of work, Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters. I promise not to let any anti-Bredt cyclobutenes get past me!

I kept meaning to write last week about GlaxoSmithKline's decision to open up a database of possible lead compounds against malaria. These were hits from a larger screen that the company ran, and been made unusually public. (Here's the press release as a PDF). There are about 13,500 structures, apparently. The company is to be commended for doing this, naturally, but I wish that the press coverage would emphasize a few things that it hasn't so far.

For one, these are not antimalarial compounds, at least not to a medicinal chemist. Some of them might be, but for now, they're all potential antimalarials, with a long, long way to go. This is all in what most drug discovery organizations call the "hit to lead" stage. Some of these compounds may well be screening artifacts. Others will turn out to work through mechanisms that won't be useful - they'll kill malaria parasites, but they'll kill lots of other things, too. Some of them will hit other targets that aren't quite as severe, but will still be enough to make them undesirabel. And many others will be too weak to be useful as they are, and turn out, after investigation, to have no clear path forward to making them more potent. And so on.

The most interesting compounds still have a long road ahead. What are their blood levels after various sorts of dosing? Which of those dosage forms are the best - the most reliable, the easiest to make, the most stable on storage? What metabolites do the compounds form in vivo, and what do those do? What long-term toxic effects might they have? How susceptible are they to resistance on the part of the parasites? On top of all these questions are the big ones, about how well these potential drugs knock down malaria under real-world conditions.

This, in short, is what drug development is all about, and it would be good to see some of this brought out in the press coverage. This is what I (and many of the readers of this site) do for a living, and it's enough to occupy all our time with plenty left over. If you can do this sort of thing, you're a drug company, and I'm always looking for opportunities to tell people just what it is that drug companies do and to move people past the evil-pharma versus saintly-university mindset. Nature has it right in their editorial:

Meanwhile, universities and other academic institutions should do more to support and reward the sort of translational research required to develop drug leads such as those offered by GSK — even though that work usually does not result in high-profile, breakthrough research papers. In addition, such translational activities provide a means for universities to contribute to public–private partnerships such as the MMV, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and the Institute for OneWorld Health.

Universities also have another part to play. Their often aggressive intellectual-property policies can stymie research and development in neglected diseases — they should ensure that their licensing deals with companies make exceptions for royalty-free use of technologies for good causes. That change, too, is beginning to happen — although, when it comes to hogging intellectual property, academics and their institutions are often among the worst offenders. . .

He's back with three more directors nominated for the company's board. There are two Icahnians there already, and this round of proxy voting will say a lot about whether shareholders think that taking Biogen down the road that Imclone went is a good thing or not. Stay tuned. . .

Over the weekend I received word from several people about impending trouble at GlaxoSmithKline. A big worldwide management hoedown, the "First Line Leader" meeting which was to take place in Atlanta this week, has been abruptly canceled. The company's upper management has informed the erstwhile attendees that since financial results will be announced this Thursday, and since this announcement might have an impact on staffing (might?, they thought it was better that all the reporting teams be together for it.

Several European newspapers have since come out with word that several thousand cuts are going to be announced, but I have no more details on what's going to happen. I suppose we're all going to find out on Thursday, though. Stand by for what's going to seem like a long week if you're at GSK, and best of luck to you if you are.

The crew at Angewandte Chemie has produced another head-shaking pun in one of their latest abstracts. Read only if (1) you know your 1980s music, and (2) you have a high tolerance for wordplay. When I was in Germany, this sort of joke was known as an "eiskalter" and was greeted with shivers.

Xconomy has a look inside the Merck-Sirna acquisition, an interview with Merck's head of that area. As you'd guess, he emphasizes that one of the biggest challenges in the field is delivery, and he makes the pitch that this is how Merck is going to make this work out:

What you often read about, but many people don’t understand, is how hard it is to make a drug. Our approach to RNA Therapeutics is made with a recognition of the full package it takes to launch a successful commercial product. . .That’s versus another strategy you see from smaller companies, which is to get an interesting experimental result, and publicly disclose it in an attempt to increase the value of your investment or a VC’s investment, without a real [awareness] of what it will take to make a therapeutic eight years later. . .

We immediately, after the acquisition, invested not just heavily in the RNA piece that is here in San Francisco, but we built an entire delivery group in West Point, PA. The thing that continues to differentiate Merck is that we have people with decades of experience in pharma R&D, drug safety, metabolism, pharmacokinetics. . .

Outside of RNA as a therapy in itself, he also talks about Merck's use of the technology to better understand its small-molecule targets. It's not something that you'll ever see press releases about, but trustworthy data of that sort is very useful and important. As the Xconomy interviewer notes, Wall Street values this sort of thing as basically zero (partly because you can't see the results of it for quite a while, if they're ever made public at all), but the value inside the company can be significant.

Of course, there can be things that happen inside drug companies that significantly destroy value, too, and it's not like the stock market can see (or understand) many of those, either, but that's a topic for another post entirely. . .and on a not perhaps unrelated note, one part of the interview above seems to suggest that "POS" is an internal Merck acronym for. . .wait for it. . ."probability of success". I, uh, kid you not.

I get a lot of press releases around here - not a day goes by that several don't show up in the e-mail queue. I glance over the titles, and I'll open up the more interesting ones and look at them in more detail. Since I feel no obligation to read unsolicited bulk mail (who does?), the less interesting ones get deleted without opening.

Most of what shows up is reasonably well targeted, from university press offices or scientific publishers, and once in a while one of them will lead to a blog post. The PR from small pharma/biotech companies is also probably well targeted, but it's much less likely to lead to anything, simply because there's so much of that stuff around and because it tends, on the average, to be decidedly less interesting: "Spamozyme, Inc. announces its new ZippyChip assay, now with the great taste of fish!" (I don't have the heart to ask Google if "ZippyChip" is the name of a real technology; I fear the answer).

But I also get things that are seriously misguided. Publicists ask me if I want to talk to someone who's just published "Nineteen All-Natural Ways to Quantum Healing" or some damn thing, and the answer is, no, of course I don't. I'd rather drop an Erlenmeyer flask on my foot. Come to that, I'd rather read press releases about the ZippyChip. I know somebody's getting value for their publicity dollar when I get an e-mail pitch asking if my readers would be interested in learning the ways to holistic health without resorting to dangerous and toxic pharmaceuticals

As many had feared, AstraZeneca used their announcement of financial results as the cue to also announce another round of layoffs. I'd been hearing word that this might be coming, but didn't have a line on the size and timing. But it's 8,000 jobs over the next four years, and that Chemistry World link says that 1,800 of them will be in R&D. Another 1,700 R&D jobs will be affected as people and departments move around.

AZ has plenty of patent trouble coming (Crestor's expiration foremost), and plenty of legal bills. So I wouldn't necessarily say that today's announcement will end the layoff process, either, unfortunately. . .

This information comes to me secondhand, so I'm not sure how accurate it is. I hope it turns out not to be true. A correspondent writes to me that he's spoken this week to someone who had recently been at the former Wyeth site in Princeton, which is in the process of shutting down. The usual practice is for industrial research sites to make surplus equipment available to academic labs and the like, but the report is that this isn't happening in this case.

Instead, glassware is just being broken and tossed, along with a lot of other equipment, and the entire chemical reagent collection is supposedly going to be carted off by a waste disposal firm for incineration. That must be the commercially available stuff on the shelves - sometimes it's not worth the paperwork and trouble to send those on somewhere else, but sometimes it is. But the glassware and equipment definitely shouldn't be going to waste, but from the sound of this report, that's just what's happening.

Can anyone add details to this? Are the people closing down that site really just heaving everything into dumpsters?

I had not been following the progress of Acorda's recently approved drug Ampyra for MS. (Well, more specifically, it's to improve gait and walking speed in MS patients). Opinion seems to be rather divided about how successful it'll be. On the one hand, new therapies for multiple sclerosis are certainly needed, but there's also room to argue about just how efficacious Ampyra really is.

I'm not going to fight that one out here, because we'll have the judgment of the market pretty soon. What I find interesting is the structure of this new drug: it's 4-aminopyridine. If there's a more simple, lower molecular weight structure approved within the next few years as an oral drug for anything, I'll be quite surprised.

This brings up several interesting topics relating to drug development and intellectual property. For one thing, this compound has been known for many years as a ligand for neuronal voltage-gated potassium channels, which is the mechanism by which it seems to work for MS patients. Some of these patients have experimented with it themselves over the years; the idea of using it for multiple sclerosis is certainly not new. (Here's a good history, taking things back a good 30 years through many players, with Elan a prominent one).

Secondly, it's not like the compound's chemical structure can be patented as such, either, since it's nowhere near novel. I have no idea of when 4-aminopyridine first makes its appearance in the chemical literature, but it's surely back into the 19th century. Nor is it anything like a rare chemical. For many years it was used as a bird-control poison. (High doses are fatal, but lower ones cause bird seizures that cause the rest of the flock to leave in consternation). We've got some on the shelf in our stockroom; I see in my Aldrich catalog that they're selling the 99% grade for $18/gram. And Aldrich is not exactly the world's low-cost chemical supplier. A railroad car full of the stuff could surely be arranged through someone, although it wouldn't exactly be pharmaceutical grade.

So. . .how then, some might wonder, does Acorda Therapeutics (partnered with Biogen Idec) get to charge several thousand dollars a year for Ampyra? (I don't think the actual price is known yet, but that's the best guess I've seen). One key factor is the bird-repellant aspect. Messing with ion channels in nerves is a tricky business, and 4-aminopyridine can and will cause trouble in humans if it's not dosed carefully. It's also (I believe) cleared pretty quickly, as you'd expect from something with that structure. Ampyra is a time-release formulation, an attempt to get enough of the compound into circulation over a long enough period, but without crossing over the line to too high a concentration, which could set off seizures and worse. Taking 4-aminopyridine from that railroad car and using that instead would be very much not recommended, considering what's waiting out there at inappropriate doses.

And that's Acorda's intellectual property. Plenty of work was done to find a good formulation for the drug, and Acorda spent the time and money to test one for safety and efficacy. They get to reap the fruits of their labors, if fruits there are. And that's what the market will decide for them. . .

It hit me, one day during my graduate career, that I was spending my nights, days, weekends, and holidays trying to make a natural product, while the bacterium that produced the thing in the first place was sitting around in the dirt of a Texas golf course, making the molecule at ambient temperature in water and managing to perform all its other pressing business at the same time. This put me in my place. I've respected biosynthesis ever since.

But there are some areas where we humans can still outproduce the small-and-slimies, and one of those is in organofluorine compounds. Fluorine's a wonderful element to use in medicinal chemistry, since it alters the electronic properties of your molecule without changing its shape (or adding much weight), and the C-F bond is metabolically inert. But those very properties can make fluorination a tricky business. If you can displace a leaving group with fluoride ion to get your compound, then good for you. Too often, though, those charges are the wrong way around, and electrophilic fluorination is the only solution. There are heaps of different ways to do this in the literature, which is a sign to the experienced chemist that there are no general methods to be had. (That's one of my Laws of the Lab, actually). The reagents needed for these transformations start with a few in the Easily Dealt With category, wind entertainingly through the Rather Unusual, and rapidly pile up over at the Truly Alarming end.

But at least we can get some things to work. The natural products with fluorine in them can be counted on the fingers. A fluorinase enzyme has been isolated which does the biotransformation on 4-fluorothreonine S-adenosyl methionine (using fluoride ion, naturally - if an enzyme is ever discovered that uses electrophilic F-plus as an intermediate, I will stand at attention and salute it). And now comes word that this has been successfully engineered into another bacterial species, and used to produce a fluorine analog of that bacterium's usual organochlorine natural product.

It isn't pretty, but it does work. One big problem is that the fluoride ion the enzyme needs is toxic to the rest of the organism, so you can't push this system too hard. But the interest in this sort of transformation is too high (and the potential stakes too lucrative) to keep it from being obscure forever. Bring on the fluorinating enzymes!

Now here's a weird one. The San Diego diagnostics company Sequenom came up with a non-invasive test for Down's Syndrome, and sold it to another outfit, Xenomics, for development. Update: I've got this transfer backwards - Xenomics licensed some of its nucleic acid technology to Sequenom, and has now regretted it. But late last year, things unraveled spectacularly. In April, Sequenom announced that there were problems with the test and announced that it had launched an internal investigation. In September came the unwelcome news that the data backing up their product were (quoting here) "inadequately substantiated". And they meant it, too, as the CEO and six other higher-ups all left the company under a cloud of confusion, recrimination, and very bad acronyms (like SEC and FBI). Last week it settled a dozen shareholder lawsuits over the whole affair.

But as that story at Bnet makes clear, the terms of the settlement were rather alarming, with Sequenom promising to do things like. . .make sure that everyone involved knew which studies were blinded and which weren't. And requiring bar-codes on the tissue sample vials. And not giving everyone access to the storage room where they were all kept. And. . .well, you get the idea. It's like seeing a sign at the burger place that says "Healthy Choice - Now With 30 Per Cent Less Aardvark Meat! And Try Our New No-Salmonella Menu!"

It can always get worse, though. Now Xenomics is suing, claiming that not only were the data weak and the controls insufficient, but that there never was a test in the first place. The complaint (available as a PDF at that link) is pretty zippy stuff by legal standards, featuring phrases such as "Defendant maintained the charade that it had. . ."

Way before all this lunacy, some people were skeptical about the company's prospects even if things went well. But hey, let's not dwell on the negatives here. If you'd like "Three Reasons to Buy Sequenom Today", this guy has them. I think I'll let this opportunity slip past, personally.

So says GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty about the Sirtris controversy - see this Forbes story for more. I hope he's right. I actually would like to see good things come out of sirtuin research - the biology's clearly interesting enough. And I would like to think that GSK didn't blow $720 million, because we could all use that sort of money these days. This story will only be settled for sure in the clinic, with the agents the GSK is developing. Good luck to them. I fear that they might need it, but I hope that they don't.

Yesterday's post touched on something that all experienced drug discovery people have been through: the compound that works - until a new batch is made. Then it doesn't work so well. What to do?

You have a fork in the road here: one route is labeled "Blame the Assay" and the other one is "Blame the Compound". Neither can be ruled out at first, but the second alternative is easier to check out, thanks to modern analytical chemistry. A clean (or at least identical) LC/MS, a good NMR, even (gasp!) elemental analysis - all these can reassure you that the compound itself hasn't changed.

But sometimes it has. In my experience, the biggest mistake is to not fully characterize the original batch, particularly if it's a purchased compound, or if it comes from the dusty recesses of the archive. You really, really want to do an analytical check on these things. Labels can be mistaken, purity can be overestimated, compounds can decompose. I've seen all of these derail things. I believe I've mentioned a putative phosphatase inhibitor I worked on once, presented to me as a fine lead right out of the screening files. We resynthesized a batch of it, which promptly made the assay collapse. Despite having been told that the original compound had checked out just fine, I sent some out for elemental analysis, and marked some of the lesser-used boxes on the form while I was at it. This showed that the archive compound was, in fact, about a 1:1 zinc complex, for reasons that were lost in the mists of time, and that this (as you can imagine) did have a bit of an effect on the primary enzyme assay.

And I've seen plenty of things that have fallen apart on storage, and several commercial compounds that were clean as could be, but whose identity had no relation to what was on their labels (or their invoices for payment, dang it all). Always check, and always do that first. But what if you have, and the second lot doesn't work, and it appears to match the first in every way?

Personally, I say run the assay again, with whatever controls you can think of. I think at that point the chances of something odd happening there are greater than the chemical alternative, which is the dreaded Infinitely Active Impurity. Several times over the years, people have tried to convince me that even though some compound may look 99% clean, that all the activity is actually down there in the trace contaminants, and that if we just find it, we'll have something that'll be so potent that it'll make our heads spin. A successful conclusion to one of these snipe hunts is theoretically possible. But I have never witnessed one.

I'm willing to credit the flip side argument, the Infinitely Nasty Impurity, a bit more. It's easier to imagine something that would vigorously mess up an assay, although even then you generally need more than a trace. An equimolar amount of zinc will do. But an incredibly active compound, one that does just what you want, but in quantities so small that you've missed seeing it? Unlikely. Look for it, sure, but don't expect to find anything - and have 'em re-run that assay while you're looking.

Update: I meant to mention this, but a comment brings it up as well. One thing that may not show up so easily is a difference in the physical form of the compound, depending on how it's produced. This will mainly show up if you're (for example) dosing a suspension of powdered drug substance in an animal. A solution assay should cancel these things out (in vitro or in vivo), but you need to make sure that everything's really in solution. . .

Nature has a short item on the Pfizer paper that questions the reproducibility of some key sirtuin work (covered here and here). There are some good points to temper the pessimism. Leonard Guarente of MIT, a key pioneer in the field, says:

". . . that the latest findings are neither surprising nor worrisome. The compounds may work only with fluorophore-conjugated peptides in vitro, says Guarente, but the situation is different in cells and in animals. The Nature paper, among others, went beyond the test tube and indicated that SIRT1 was more active in cells and in animals after application of the Sirtris compounds. Furthermore, resveratrol administration made no difference to the lifespan of yeast that did not have Sir23, indicating that the compound's action depends on this gene.

According to a statement from GlaxoSmithKline, Ahn's conclusion "ignores any possibility of direct activation of SIRT1 that may occur in a cellular environment that is not reproduced in vitro".

True, but there's still that problem of the Pfizer group not being able to reproduce the in vivo effects, which to me was perhaps the most worrisome part of the paper. Now, it's worth remembering that animal studies are not the easiest things in the world to do right, since there are so many variables. Small differences in animal strains and the like can sometimes throw things off severely. Even the Pfizer group admits this readily, with Kay Ahn telling Nature that "every in vivo experiment is a little bit different" and that "Under our conditions we didn't see beneficial effects, but we don't want to make a big conclusion out of those results."

That's an honorable way to put things, I have to say. Rather less honorable, though, at least to me, is David Sinclair's response from the Sirtris team. See what you think:

A possible explanation for the discrepancy, says Sinclair, is that Ahn and her colleagues did not provide information on the characterization of the compounds, which they synthesized themselves. So there is no way of knowing how pure they were or whether they're the same as those made by Sirtris. "The fact that mice died indicates that there may be an issue with purity,"

That's. . .not so good. In fact, it comes close to being insulting. Although I say a lot of uncomplimentary things about Pfizer's management, the fact remains that they have a lot of very good scientists there. And I assume that they can reproduce Sirtris's published procedures to make the sirtuin ligands. If they can't, frankly, that's Sirtris's fault. Everyone (well, everyone competent) checks out compounds thoroughly before putting them into an animal study. Asking "Are you sure you made the right stuff?" at this point is really a bit much, and doesn't do anything improve my opinion of Sirtris. (Which opinion actually was pretty good - until recently).

I've written here before about how I used to think that I understood G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), but that time and experience have proven to me that I didn't know much of anything. One of the factors that's complicated that field is the realization that these receptors can interact with each other, forming dimers (or perhaps even larger assemblies) which presumably are there for some good reason, and can act differently from the classic monomeric form.

A neat paper has appeared in PNAS that gives us some quantitative numbers on this phenomenon, and some great pictures as well. What you're looking at is a good ol' CHO cell, transfected with muscarinic M1 receptors. Twenty years ago (gulp) I was cranking out compounds to tickle cell membranes of this exact type, among others. The receptors are visualized by a fluorescent ligand (telenzepine), and the existence of dimers can be inferred by the "double-intensity" spots shown in the inset.

With this kind of resolution and time scale, the UK team that did this work could watch the receptors wandering over the cell surface in real time. It's a classic random walk, as far as they can tell. Watching the cohort of high-intensity spots, they can see changes as they switch to lower-intensity monomers and back again. Over a two-second period, it appeared that about 81% of the tracks were monomers, 9% were dimers, and 3% changed over during the tracking. (The remaining 7% were impossible to assign with confidence, which makes me wonder what's lurking down there).

They refined the technique by using two differently-fluorescent forms of labeled telenzepine, labeling the cells in a 50/50 ratio, and watching what happens to the red, green, (and combined yellow) spots over time. It looks as if the receptor population is a steady-state mix of monomers and dimers, exchanging on a time scale of seconds. Of course, the question comes up of how different ligands might affect this process, and you could begin to answer that with different fluorescent species. But since the technique depends on having a low-off-rate species bound to the receptor in order to see it, some of the most interesting dynamic questions will have to wait. It's still very nice to actually see these things, though; it gives a medicinal chemist something to picture. . .

This one's also from the Department of Placebo Effects - read on. An interesting paper out in Nature details a study where volunteers took small doses of testosterone or placebo, and then participated in a standard behavioral test, the "Ultimatum Game". That's the one where two people participate, with one of them given a sum of money (say, $10), that's to be divided between the two of them. The player with the money makes an offer to divide the pot, which the other player can only take or leave (no counteroffers). A number of interesting questions about altruism and competition have been examined through this game and its variants - basically, the first thing to ask is how much the "dictator" player will feel like offering at all. (If you like, here's the Freakonomics guys talking about the game, which features in a chapter of their latest, SuperFreakonomics).

What's been found in many studies is that the second players often reject offers that they feel are insultingly low, giving up a sure gain for the sake of pride and sending a message to the first player. I think of this as the "Let me tell you what you can do with your buck-fifty" option. So what does exposure to testosterone do for this behavior? As the authors of the new paper talk about, there are two (not necessarily exclusive) theories about some of the hormone's effects. Increases in aggression and competitiveness are widely thought to be one of these, but there's also a good amount of literature to suggest that status-seeking behavior is perhaps more important. But if someone is going to be aggressive about the ultimatum game, they're going to make a lowball offer and damn the consequences, whereas if they're looking for status, they may well choose a course that avoids having their offer thrown back in their face.

Using known double-blind conditions for testosterone dosing in female subjects (sublingual dosing four hours before the test), the second behavior was observed. Update: keep in mind, women have endogenous testosterone, too. The subjects who got testosterone made more generous offers (from about $3.50 to closer to $4.00). The error bars on that measurement just miss overlapping, p = 0.031. But here's the part I found even more interesting: the subjects who believed that they got testosterone made significantly less fair/generous offers than the ones who believed that they got the placebo (P = 0.006). Because, after all, testosterone makes you all tough and nasty, as everyone knows. As the authors sum it up:

"The profound impact of testosterone on bargaining behaviour supports the view that biological factors have an important role in human social interaction. This does, of course, not mean that psychological factors are not important. In fact, our finding that subjects’ beliefs about testosterone are negatively associated with the fairness of bargaining offers points towards the importance of psychological and social factors. Whereas other animals may be predominantly under the influence of biological factors such as hormones, biology seems to exert less control over human behaviour. Our findings also teach an important methodological lesson for future studies: it is crucial to control for subjects’ beliefs because the pure substance effect may be otherwise under- or overestimated. . ."

I promise you that. Take a look at this abstract:

". . .an unappreciated physicochemical property of xenon has been that this gas also binds to the active site of a series of serine proteases. Because the active site of serine proteases is structurally conserved, we have hypothesized and investigated whether xenon may alter the catalytic efficiency of tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a serine protease that is the only approved therapy for acute ischemic stroke today."

They go on to provide evidence that xenon is indeed a tPA inhibitor. And as it turns out, there's more evidence for xenon having a number of physiological effects, and enzyme inhibition has been proposed as one mechanism. Who knew?

Now, there's an SAR challenge. . .

I am here to confess to a deep-seated prejudice, one that has been with me for many years now. I know that others feel differently, but I'm sticking to my rule: No Naphthyls.

OK, pile on me now for having a closed mind. I know that there are drugs that are more successful than anything I'll ever make that have a naphthalene in them. (At least that structure's a small one). It's just that I see a naphthyl as the worst sort of "potency through greasiness" move in drug design. They hurt your solubility, drive up your molecular weight, open you to metabolites that you may not care for, and all for what? A little activity in your in vitro assay.

I'm getting close to putting cyclohexyl on the same list, if you want to know the truth. Problem is, people make these things "just as SAR compounds". You know, they'll trowel this hunk of grease onto the side of the molecule, just to see what happens, and if it really looks good, well, they'll. . .find some way to make it better. Right. Tetrahydropyranyl instead, that'll do it. But my attitude is, why not just make the THP derivative in the first place, if that's where you're going to go?

SAR is long, and life is short. There isn't time to make everything. So I decided a long time ago that I'd try to only make structures that I could live with. That still admits a lot of weird stuff, don't get me wrong. I have functional groups on my go-to lists that make people roll their eyes. But I draw the line at flat slabs of lard. No naphthalenes.

There's probably a lot of undiscovered information sitting out there in clinical trial data sets. And while I was just worrying the other day about people with no statistical background digging through such things, I have to give equal time to the flip side: having many different competent observers taking a crack at these numbers would, in fact, be a good thing.

Here's one effort of that sort, as detailed in Molecular Systems Biology. The authors have set up a database of all the side-effect information released through package inserts of approved drugs, which was much more of a pain than it sounds like, since the format of this information isn't standardized.

Looking over their data, the drugs with the highest number of side effects are the central nervous system agents, which makes sense. Many of these are polypharmacological; I'm almost surprised they aren't even worse by a wider margin. Antiparasitics have the fewest side effects (possibly because some of these don't even have to be absorbed?), followed by "systemic hormonal preparations". To be fair, the CNS category has the largest number of drugs in it, and those other two have the least, so this may be just a sampling problem. At a glance, one category that seems to have a disproportionate number of side effects, compared its number of approved drugs, is the "genitourinary/sex hormone" class, with muskoskeletal agents also making a stronger showing than their numbers might indicate.

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi-Aventis, gave a speech out at the recent J. P. Morgan healthcare fiesta in San Francisco. He spoke about how nasty the last ten years have been for the industry, calling it a "lost decade", but one particular item really caught my eye (emphasis mine):

". . .for the most part people have zero expectations of Sanofi-Aventis research and development,” he said. “We’ve basically cleared out a lot of bad news, and if anything comes along it should be good news.”

Well, that's one way to do it. I wonder if the performance reviews and yearly goal-setting forms over there read the same way?

It's been a busy day on the front lines of science around here; apologies for not getting anything up until now. Here's a topic that I was discussing with some colleagues not too long ago: how much do we need to know about each other's specialties, anyway? I'm assuming that the answer is "more than nothing", although if someone wants to make the zilch case, I'd be interested in hearing it done.

But once past that, what's the optimum? I (for example) have never done cell culture. Nor do I see myself ever needing to do it (and anyone who needs me to is clearly in a bad way). I know the broad outlines of the field, but almost none of the details, and I'm sure that even my broad outlines have some faint parts in them. So if I'm at some sort of meeting where the problem-of-the-day turns on cell culture issues, I can be of no help at all. Is this a problem? I understand that different cells take to culture conditions differently, have varying growth rates, need media changes and whatnot, can generally only be passaged a certain number of times, etc. In short, I know roughly what to expect from my cell culture colleagues, and what would be silly of me to demand. Is that about right?

After all, I don't expect them to know the ins and outs of medicinal chemistry, particularly the synthetic organic lab part of it. Things like methylene chloride being rather more weirdly polar as a solvent than you'd expect, or the fact that some amines will stick to solid magnesium sulfate drying agent (but not sodium sulfate), or how you can azeotrope out acetic acid with toluene, or how you want palladium tetrakis to be lemon yellow and not orange - these and dozens of others are the tricks of my lab trade, and they don't know mine in the same way that I don't know theirs.

But I do like it when my biology colleagues have the broad outlines - that molecules with chiral centers, other things being equal, are often harder to make than achiral structures, that sticking a lot of cycloalkyl grease on a molecule is asking for metabolic trouble (no matter what it does for the potency in the assays), what sorts of things tend to make a molecule more (or less) soluble, and so on. Those are the equivalent of me knowing that primary cell lines lose some of their functions in culture, the difference between transient transfection and a stable cell line, etc.

It seems to me that each discipline in our business could draw up a list of What Everyone Else In the Company Should Know about their area. So, to start off with, I'm throwing the comments section over to what biologists (and others) should know, at a minimum, about med-chem. Take it away!

About a year ago, I wrote here about the impressive-looking new biochemistry building at Oxford, and wondered if it would work out quite the way the architects intended. Now I see a report from a post-doc who actually works there:

My first thoughts setting foot into the new building were the following: How are we supposed to concentrate with our offices in the atrium? How are we going to manage to work at such tiny desks?
I have to say, these initial concerns were justified. We hear the lab phone of every single floor ringing through the atrium, including people's mobile phones (which also causes envy towards those who actually have reception). When people really need to concentrate on writing, reading or thinking while others are discussing their work or are simply chatting, the atmosphere can get pretty tense. And even if it was completely silent in the atrium, the small size of the desks already makes working difficult. . .I once discussed the lack of space with our head of department. He simply replied: when you have to write a paper, you work from home anyway... I'd say £47 million well spent!

Anyone else over there want to comment?

Anyone looking over large data sets from human studies needs to be constantly on guard. Sinkholes are everywhere, many of them looking (at first glance) like perfectly solid ground on which to build some conclusions. This, to be honest, is one of the real problems with full release of clinical trial data sets: if you're not really up on your statistics, you can convince yourself of some pretty strange stuff.

Even people who are supposed to know what they're doing can bungle things. For instance, you may well have noticed a lot of papers coming out in the last few years correlating neuroimaging studies (such as fMRI) with human behaviors and personality traits. Neuroimaging is a wonderfully wide-open, complex, and important field, and I don't blame people for a minute for pushing it as far as it can go. But just how far is that?

A recent paper (PDF) suggests that the conclusions have run well ahead of the numbers. Recent papers have been reporting impressive correlations between the activation of particular brain regions and associated behaviors and traits. But when you look at the reproducibility of the behavioral measurements themselves, the correlation is 0.8 at best. And the reproducibility of the blood-oxygen fMRI measurements is about 0.7. The highest possible correlation you could expect from those two is the square root of their product, or 0.74. Problem is. . .a number of papers, including ones that get the big press, show correlations much higher than that. Which is impossible.

The Neurocritic blog has more details on this. What seems to have happened is that many researchers found signals in their patients that correlated with the behavior that they were studying, and then used that same set of data to compute the correlations between the subjects. I find, by watching people go by the in the street, that I can pick out a set of people who wear bright red jackets and have ugly haircuts. Herding them together and rating them on the redness of their attire and the heinousness of their hair, I find a notably strong correlation! Clearly, there is an underlying fashion deficiency that leads to both behaviors. Or people had their hair in their eyes when they bought their clothes. Further studies are indicated.

No, you can't do it like that. A selection error of that sort could let you relate anything to anything. The authors of the paper (Edward Vul and Nancy Kanwisher of MIT) have done the field a great favor by pointing this out. You can read how the field is taking the advice here.

Allow me to recommend a book I received a copy of recently, Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Chad's a fellow scientific blogger from way back, and I have had a chance to consume chicken wings and trade lab stories with him. His new book is a fine addition to the what-the-heck-is-quantum-mechanics field, with some very good analogies and explanations. The format is conversational (which has a long history in the teaching of science), but this time, Orzel's dog is holding up the other end of the dialog. It's a device that lets him get at some pretty complex subjects - complex even for humans, I mean. (The famous Gary Larson "Far Side" cartoon, about dogs being so cute when they try to comprehend quantum mechanics does come to mind). Definitely worth a look.

So, after reading what Pfizer has to say about Sirtris (and by extension, about GlaxoSmithKline's heavy investment in them), let's go over the possibilities. What happened, and what's going on?

We'll start out with the first branch point: either Pfizer (and Amgen) are right that there's trouble with the Sirtris assays and compounds (Reality A, I'll call it), or they're wrong (Reality B). For the rest of this piece, I'm going to assume that they're right, because I think that this is almost certainly the case. At least two separate groups of competent investigators have reported trouble, and that's good enough for me. (We'll discuss the implications of that in a bit).

Now we come to the second branch point: either Glaxo did enough due diligence to be aware of the problems (scenario A1) or they didn't realize them at the time of the deal (scenario A2). If A1 is the case, then we'd have to assume that the most likely consequence (A1a) is that Sirtris had other non-public assets that did check out, and that GSK's management felt that these justified the purchase. (A1b would be the scenario where GSK was well aware of the Sirtris problems, knew also that they didn't have anything else to offer, and bought them anyway, which doesn't make sense). These assets could have been other compounds, and/or a leg up on the complicated biology of this field. The difficulty with that line of thinking is that having found the fundamental assay problems with the Sirtris work, the GSK people would surely have been much more cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions about the rest of the company's intellectual property.

If A2 is the case, then we're looking at sheer fecklessness on the part of GSK's upper management. I'd like to be able to rule this out, but there have been other deals in the history of this industry that make that hard to do. I have witnessed at least one such personally. One problem is that these deals tend to be initiated near the highest levels of a company, and these people are not always the most technically savvy (or up-to-date) members of an organization. Even with a science background, the CEO of a large company does not have the time to be a scientist. (I'm reminded of Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year: "I'm not an actor - I'm a movie star!"

Overall, though, I find it hard to believe that no one would have noticed the reported problems at all, which leads me to favor what I'll call scenario A3: the problems with the Sirtris assays may well have been known/realized at the lower scientific levels of GSK's organization, but these concerns may not have made it to the top in a sufficiently timely or vigorous manner. The deal would have gone through under its own momentum, then, in a flurry of last-minute misgivings which would have been hard to distinguish from the usual butterflies that accompany any large transaction or the preliminary stirrings of buyer's remorse. The sorts of reasons advanced in the A1 paragraph above would have been used to justify pushing ahead. With that in mind, this scenario could be broken down further into A3a, where Sirtris also had some other assets that the rest of us haven't seen, and A3b, where they didn't. I think that A3a is more likely, since that would have provided some of the momentum to get the deal done regardless. A3b is basically A2 with different timing and slightly less cluelessness.

So where do things go from here? That obviously depends on which of those three realities obtains. If A1 (specifically A1a) is the case, then GSK plows ahead with their secret Sirtris assets and compounds, and good luck to all concerned. It's worth keeping in mind that sirtuins are quite interesting and important, and that it's an area worth investigating on its own merits. (Pfizer and Amgen, among others, must think so too; that's the only reason that they would have been trying to replicate the Sirtris work).

If A2 is the real story, well, I'm very sorry to hear it. A lot of people seem ready to believe this one, partly because of anger over the layoffs the company has been going through. The most likely consequence of A2 is that $720 million dollars disappears, never to yield anything that's of use to anyone, so I hope that this isn't what happened.

And if, as I think, A3 is what actually happened, then that sort of depends on whether we're looking at A3a or A3b. If the former, then Glaxo overpaid, but has a fighting chance to redeem itself. If the latter, then Glaxo not only overpaid, but (as with A2) is in danger of losing its whole investment as well. We'll all find out.

But we may not find out very quickly. GSK has (like many other companies) a tendency to be rather close-mouthed about the progress of some of its research. When I worked in the nuclear receptor field, we all were very interested in the fate of a particular Glaxo compound, the first selective PPAR-delta ligand to go into the clinic. The company had talked about some animal and preclinical data, but we knew that they were taking it into humans (after all, it was listed that way in their pipeline updates). But it stayed listed like that. . .and stayed. . .and stayed. . .until, as the months and years passed, it became obvious to even the most optimistic observer that the compound's development was (at the very least) extremely complicated, and (more likely) had actually quietly ceased a good while before, albeit with no change in its public status.

In this case, now that these doubts have come up, GSK has a real interest in pointing out any success it may have. If its sirtuin compounds go into the clinic and just sort of hang there, that will probably be an even worse sign than usual. And if no sirtuin compounds even go into the clinic at all, well, the question has answered itself. I hope that's not what happens.

Or nocebo, in this case, since people were sure that they were being harmed. Residents of a Johannesburg suburb detailed their reactions to a new cell phone tower in the area: rashes, headaches, nausea, disrupted sleep, and more. Electromagnetic poison, for sure. (Clearly they haven't heard that they might be at less risk for Alzheimer's).

What they didn't know was that the tower had been switched off for six weeks before the hearing. Descriptions of symptoms disappearing when the beleagured locals managed to sleep somewhere else for a night, only to reoccur when they came back to their homes, are thus a bit hard to reconcile. . .