"David Ewing Duncan and Dr. Moira Gunn speak with Joshua Boger, the President and CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX). They discuss rational drug design: how Vertex re-engineered their HIV/AIDS drug into one for Hepatitis C."
This 30 minute interview gives a good in the trenches view of what it takes for a biotech to bring a finished product to the market, Boger calls it the best video game around. He also talks about something that resonated with me namely that as a company this is really about managing a portfolio more than any one single drug. To me making a sustainable biotech, leveraging the knowledge in the database of all the successful and failed tests seems like there would be a lot of value. The basic science that was targeted at HIV could also be applied to HCV. In other words iterating and updating what you do based on both successes and failures. Sounds like a rational approach to me. In software security, we often want to find security mechanisms that deal with a wide variety of threats. The biotechs are playing at risk management with billions of dollars and human lives at stake based on their risk management investment and direction decisions.
A couple of other interesting notes, Boger says they take the approach of putting their basic science out into the literature so everyone can learn from it even if there is some competitive disadvantage. This seems to me to be analogous to companies like Red Hat that do open source software. I think the act of formalizing something to the degree that it it publishable probably helps with the rigor of the internal analysis.
In the discussion of HCV, he noted they are looking to have 1,000 patients in clinical trials by end of 2007, and look to send it to the FDA in 2008. They estimate based on what the CDC shows that there are 3-4 million people chronically infected in America (4 times as many Americans dealing with these liver issues than there are with HIV). The company has had some success with their protease inhibitors which execute a DoS like effect ion virus.
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