3 ms·

Often the first thing companies do when they license tech from academia is try to reproduce the findings in a rigorous setting, rather than jumping straight int

Often the first thing companies do when they license tech from academia is try to reproduce the findings in a rigorous setting, rather than jumping straight into novel work. Behind closed doors, big pharma scientists complain about the quality of academic work even published in leading journals This problem is real and is probably not going to be addressed within the academic community. However, as more scientists realize that the path to running your own lab and directing your own research agenda lies in working at startups rather than in academia / big pharma, hopefully the way science is done will change In CA at least, venture capital funds more life science R&D than do NIH dollars, and probably more than big biotech (Genentech / Amgen / Gilead etc)

SiempreViernes 9y ago
If big pharma are fine with paying for shitty research instead of spending money on doing it themselves that's their choice I guess.
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  That's true, but what's happening now is that startups are licensing tech from academia, making it closer to "industrial grade" in terms of scale and quality, proving the concept more definitively (usually in humans) then selling to big pharma. Big pharma does license stuff from academia all the time, but for orders of magnitude less money than what they pay for startups with good research
novaRom 9y ago
> Behind closed doors, big pharma scientists complain about the quality of academic work Same in Deep Learning research - 99% of papers today is just an obfuscated description of their "alchemy". Even from famous universities and companies.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
epistasis 9y ago
There have been public complaints about this too, such as that "cancer findings don't reproduce" editorial (where "reproduce" is defined as "generalize") that got lots of press 5 years ago. My best understanding of the situation is that big pharma and research are going at opposite purposes. Big pharma wants something that generalizes and can lead to drugs that hit almost all of the target population. Research emphasizes novelty, and finding new stuff, which most often won't generalize. Chasing the findings in "leading journals" is going to escalate this disconnect. Leading journals go for novelty and surprise alone. These are exactly the findings that are least likely to generalize. I'd love to see how and where VC is funding life science research. It seems unlikely that the types of projects that VC funds would overlap the type of research that NIH funds, but I would love to be wrong on that!
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  Its definitely true that big pharma and academic research are def going at divergent purposes, which isnt always a bad thing, but i agree that when quality is sacrificed for "publishability" then i dont think anyone wins. A more somber issue with reproducibility is that you simply cant replicate a study's results independently even if you do it the exact same way. Not only is it not generalizable, it isnt even robust in a specific case. A lot of this is just due to chance, but in the worst instances, this happens because researchers are able to bias experiments to get a result. There are so many tiny details of experimental design and execution that influence results, and a lot of these dont end up in the "methods" section of a publication Some big pharma companies and startups are actually starting to look at specific rather than general populations (the whole "precision medicine" thing), which is good. This lowers revenue potential, but decreases risk of clinical trial failure, bc you are only targeting a group of patients where you have high-ish confidence it will work. VC is increasingly funding stuff that would be done in academia. Biotech startups have been so successful in recent years that investors are taking on more risk, which means earlier stage, bolder science, and this overlaps with some academic stuff. Most VC funded stuff is translational in nature though, ie projects in between academia and big pharma. however only a few "profitable" diseases get funded, like cancer and orphan disease. very little going in in psychiatric disease, addiction, heart disease, diabetes

SiempreViernes 9y ago

If big pharma are fine with paying for shitty research instead of spending money on doing it themselves that's their choice I guess.

aaavl2821 9y ago
That's true, but what's happening now is that startups are licensing tech from academia, making it closer to "industrial grade" in terms of scale and quality, proving the concept more definitively (usually in humans) then selling to big pharma. Big pharma does license stuff from academia all the time, but for orders of magnitude less money than what they pay for startups with good research

novaRom 9y ago

> Behind closed doors, big pharma scientists complain about the quality of academic work Same in Deep Learning research - 99% of papers today is just an obfuscated description of their "alchemy". Even from famous universities and companies.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

epistasis 9y ago

There have been public complaints about this too, such as that "cancer findings don't reproduce" editorial (where "reproduce" is defined as "generalize") that got lots of press 5 years ago. My best understanding of the situation is that big pharma and research are going at opposite purposes. Big pharma wants something that generalizes and can lead to drugs that hit almost all of the target population. Research emphasizes novelty, and finding new stuff, which most often won't generalize. Chasing the findings in "leading journals" is going to escalate this disconnect. Leading journals go for novelty and surprise alone. These are exactly the findings that are least likely to generalize. I'd love to see how and where VC is funding life science research. It seems unlikely that the types of projects that VC funds would overlap the type of research that NIH funds, but I would love to be wrong on that!

aaavl2821 9y ago
Its definitely true that big pharma and academic research are def going at divergent purposes, which isnt always a bad thing, but i agree that when quality is sacrificed for "publishability" then i dont think anyone wins. A more somber issue with reproducibility is that you simply cant replicate a study's results independently even if you do it the exact same way. Not only is it not generalizable, it isnt even robust in a specific case. A lot of this is just due to chance, but in the worst instances, this happens because researchers are able to bias experiments to get a result. There are so many tiny details of experimental design and execution that influence results, and a lot of these dont end up in the "methods" section of a publication Some big pharma companies and startups are actually starting to look at specific rather than general populations (the whole "precision medicine" thing), which is good. This lowers revenue potential, but decreases risk of clinical trial failure, bc you are only targeting a group of patients where you have high-ish confidence it will work. VC is increasingly funding stuff that would be done in academia. Biotech startups have been so successful in recent years that investors are taking on more risk, which means earlier stage, bolder science, and this overlaps with some academic stuff. Most VC funded stuff is translational in nature though, ie projects in between academia and big pharma. however only a few "profitable" diseases get funded, like cancer and orphan disease. very little going in in psychiatric disease, addiction, heart disease, diabetes