Ramblings: April 2022
4 December 2022
My poor Substack has been languishing for a long while, so here’s me making an attempt to catch up before the new year…
Here are some collected Twitter ramblings from April 2022, with some additional color commentary sprinkled in.
This month’s photo of the month is from the Rocks Trail at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Pound Ridge, NY. This was a tough, rugged trail with beautiful scenery throughout.
Truthfully, I’m not sure I see myself doing drug discovery, or at least not my current role within drug discovery, for the rest of my career. I’ve thought an awful lot about going in different directions for the last ~10 years before I fully hang it up. Teaching is appealing. Many folks at work have asked when I’m starting a brewery (answer: never).
Note post date.
Lovely trail in Westchester County, NY - can’t wait to go back and do this one again. There are many more miles of trails in this system too that I haven’t explored.
This is the risk of scaling up a pharma organization. The larger the mouth is that you have to feed, the easier it is to leave behind impactful treatments for patients because of limited commercial opportunity. Although I know some out there would like drugs to be discovered and marketed based on altruism, until the business learns to tackle its 95% failure rate, I don’t see it happening.
The buck has to stop somewhere…
As anyone in pharma can probably tell you, publication of a dazzling result in a high impact journal is rarely a guarantee that the content of said publication is actually true. I sense a lot of startups fail because they’re based on a spinout of a single shaky premise from a single lab.
It was lovely to be back to in-person conferences this year. And while I appreciate the science energy of the next generation of scientists at the table next to mine, I also appreciate in my mid-40s that you’re only young once. I wish I’d spent a lot more time goofing off during my undergrad days.
It was a bit emotional walking into the convention center after such a long hiatus. AACR is by far my favorite meeting.
This burnout is real, and now that simul-casting online for remote attendees is a thing, I should take greater advantage of that to decompress my schedule. Plenty of time after the live meeting to review presentations online in a more leisurely way.
This was a feisty session featuring a fairly extensive takedown of AI/ML in drug discovery by Derek Lowe. I think he brought the right attitude to this topic, which is: man, I want this to work, because we’ll take all the help we can get. But man, is it being way oversold vs. reality today.
It’s probably a good thing I don’t live in New Orleans or I’d be on track for a heart attack in the next 5 years.
I guess not everything that happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans. But it was delightful to see so many old friends, and meet new ones. And meet people I’ve met through Twitter in person!
This was my industrial antidote to this whole business about posters that was zinging around Twitter. Our currency is patents, full stop.
One day maybe I’ll write more about this, but I don’t want to out the organization that tried to do this. If you have that many concerns about your organizational productivity, that probably means it’s time to prune the weakest branches off the tree — rather than impose onerous metrics on everyone, including your top performers.
The onset of myopia on a drug discovery project is really, really fast. One of the greatest value-adds to your discovery team is getting a consult from someone outside the team who doesn’t carry all of your priors.
Accurate.
I hereby dub this Waterson’s Rule.
Lotta people got this wrong. The free drug hypothesis is one of the most important drug discovery concepts to grasp — and also one of the most frequently misunderstood.
As a whole, the pharma industry could do with a lot less meetings. It begins with trusting and empowering your project leaders to hit their deliverables. Then the constant oversight/check-in with layers of management & leadership becomes largely unnecessary. There’s an implied lack of trust in “too many meetings”.
Absorption vs. bioavailability. Another tragically misunderstood concept.