Inventing and innovating the wheel

Pharma likely has its answers in its Discovery and phase I portfolios...

What does someone mean when they say “OK, let’s not reinvent the wheel…”

I was reminded of so much in this Tom Standage book, including this paragraph, on the literally thousands of years between someone ‘inventing’ the wheel, people mostly not knowing how to use it, and more widespread uptake:

You’ll know as a follower of this Substack that I’ve maintained that it’s impossible to understand and improve innovation if you can’t define it. Our own Pharmaceutical Innovation and Invention Index was an attempt to get the industry to focus on developing products that the market wants on purpose rather than by accident…

Here’s a perfect example: the invention of the wheel, and the innovation it represented, were separated by centuries. The wheel didn’t need reinventing, it needed re-innovating.

This is the case in the pharmaceutical industry still, where poor decisions are made in Discovery/ phase I, leaving ‘wheels’ on the shelf because of the terrain, rather than reimagining both. Markets today will tell us something about what we need in 15 years time, but they can’t tell us everything - because they don’t know. Targeting our new medicines at what physicians will prescribe, and what payers will pay for, in 15 years, requires decision systems that increase the importance of those parameters, instead of fitness solely for the purpose of leaping phase I, phase II and phase III hurdles.