I’m glad to have the chance to contribute some blogging here, as well as on my own site. I’ll be representing the pharmaceutical drug-discovery end of things. In other words, in terms of the drug pipeline, people like me are back where the water starts springing out of the bare rock. The kind of work that I do shows up in the clinic (if I’m lucky) several years after I make the new compound. Over the years, I’ve worked on clinical candidates for diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s.

What’s it like back there at the beginning of the process? Well, it’s jumpy. You’ll notice that all of those diseases I’ve worked on are still with us. As everyone knows, drug companies aren’t happy with their discovery pipelines. I’ve been in the industry long enough that if I’d found something good back near the beginning of my career, we’d already be worried about its patent expiration and market share by now. But not enough people like me have found enough of those in the last ten or fifteen years.

I’ll be talking about some of the reasons for that and what might be done about improving things. But I’ll also weigh in on some of the macro pharmaceutical issues - pricing, patient access, intellectual property, and so on. It’s never a dull time in this business, but there’s a strong impression that the next few years are going to be less dull than ever before.