All for one, and one for all

Multiple shots on the goal of making better decisions...

In a good year, a top 30 pharma company will launch one drug. Only 7 of the top 30 managed to launch 2 per year...

Unfortunately, in trying to improve this situation, pharma tends to focus on trying to emulate the successes instead of understanding the failures (and, of course, with these launches being such a rare case, most of what we're doing is failing).

So, interestingly, we tend to hear 'multiple shots on goal' as a way to mitigate the risk that any one molecule will end up delivering against a target, or a disease. However, the important risk mitigation we need is against our decision process being the wrong one, or one that won't give us the decisions we need

How many companies have ever experimented with anything other than a version of the decision process they did last year? How many have alternative approaches, or embrace diversity of thought? 2020 forced many companies to revisit their decision process, at least around their Covid efforts. It is also interesting to see how Lilly have enabled their biotech groups to remain independent, and to make their own decisions - meaning there's diversity not just in the people making decisions, but in how they make those decisions too... How many companies invite alternative views on their asset's development path, instead of just hoping that they bettered their competitors'?

Given how much pharma leans on a prediction paradigm throughout development, despite knowing that they cannot predict biology, clinical outcomes or market performance (even less so when the asset is in early phase), it is unsurprising that we maintain faith in a system that fails so much. But, perhaps some want to do it differently? If Flagship Pioneering wants to launch 100 drugs in 10 years, they'd be outperforming the industry's best by a factor of 3-4 every year for 10 years... You could only do that by behaving differently, not just by doing what the others do but with smarter people...