Misunderstanding Zuckerberg
The 'move fast, break things' deniers
Whenever the famous Zuckerberg quote ‘move fast and break things’ comes up, there are a lot of sniffy pharma folks who’ll add ‘of course, in pharma we can’t break things…’
Two things: pharma breaks things all the time. 99 of 100 things, to be exact. It ‘breaks’ most of the molecules it puts into its pipeline. So, the ‘we’re not allowed to break things’ redound is rather disingenuous. Also, that’s not what he meant.
What he meant, of course, is to try things quickly. To prototype, to test, to explore. That moving slowly is worse in almost every respect than learning. ‘Fast failure’ meaning ‘fail cheap’ rather than fail expensively.
I have written recently on failure at phase III. In essence, pharma’s adage is ‘move extremely slowly and break things anyway.’
‘Move fast and break things’ means ‘learn fast’ - as I wrote when talking about the history of the ‘clunkers’, ‘test and fail’ means learning, if you do it right. Breaking things and not learning would be the crime, but of course that is what linear development currently does - a bunch of drugs about which little has been learned, because so little exploration was done.
What would it mean for pharma to ‘prototype’? It would mean establishing more concepts for which to do proof of concept. What is your ‘concept’ for your rheumatoid arthritis drug, for example? Symptom relief, inflammation, damage prevention, disease modification? That it would also work in lupus or psoriasis? All different concepts, but pharma prefers to ‘break’ those concepts sequentially, rather than in parallel.
‘Breaking’ concepts is the norm. Mostly we don’t prove them. The point of the adage is to break them as quickly as possible - ideally, we’d do it before we get into humans.