By Ricardo Macarron

I am writing this column upon my return from SBS’ very successful conference and exhibition in Montréal. The excitement of so many top-notch presentations, posters and gatherings with friends is still with me even though the meeting is over. The trade show was once again that marketplace where you can find anything you need from instruments to software, from reagents to labware...in addition to enjoying good company throughout the exhibit hall.

A Diverse Society
In 2004, the SBS Board of Directors and Conference Committee agreed that whereas the 2006 annual conference would be a bit more chemistry centric than had been the case in the past,  the 2007 meeting would revolve around biology and science from academia. Differentiating the themes in an effort to draw solid attendance for both the September meeting and the inaugural April meeting  has clearly paid off.  Despite torrential rain in the United States and snow in Montreal, our 13th annual conference was well attended, with 2440 attendees, 177 exhibitors, and 367 poster presenters.

As always, the strong scientific program held appeal for anyone eager to learn more  about new trends in biology as they pertain to drug discovery and chemical biology. In a clear increase over previous meetings, 40% of the speakers came from academia, reflecting a growing trend towards academic participation in the society, as well as increasing academic submissions to the Journal of Biomolecular Screening. Clearly, the society provides a fertile meeting ground for industrial and academic researchers, users and vendors to freely exchange ideas and experiences in drug discovery.

Does Drug Discovery Need to Change?
A recurring theme at this, as well as previous, SBS meetings, and in other drug-discovery conferences and articles, is the perceived failure of genomics, combinatorial chemistry, HTS and innovative biomedical research in general (and big pharma in particular) to deliver a robust flow of new drugs. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that the output of our industry in terms of the number of new chemical entities (NCEs) approved per year has been declining. However, jumping from that fact to the conclusion that there are gross errors in the way pharmaceutical research has been conducted over the last 17 years may be premature, reflecting a superficial view of our progress.

Any analysis of this nature should start by considering the lag time between the start of a drug-discovery project and market launch (about 15 years), the learning curve associated with the introduction of new technologies (e.g., combinatorial chemistry produced molecules of little use until the widespread application of Lipinski’s rules, published in 1997), and the fact that not a single drug-discovery organization has remained static during this period.

A study conducted in 2005 by the consulting company Accenture and The Centre for Medicines Research International concluded that for the period 2000-2002, the success rate in early discovery for new targets was 3%, whereas for established targets, it was 17%. The push to innovate may not look financially sound, at least in the short term, but it is ethically the right thing to do. Pharmaceutical companies have universally embraced the challenge to solve unmet medical needs and progress “me-toos” only by exception when there is clear need for improved drugs in a partially solved area. Development of new drugs takes place nowadays in a climate in which government agencies that control new launches (FDA, EMEA, etc) operate in a risk-averse manner (more so after public over-reaction to the side effects of some marketed drugs).

Despite the lower success with new targets and the higher scientific, commercial, clinical and regulatory hurdles, there are hundreds of compounds in Phase III clinical trials. Only with more time (at least 3-5 more years) will we be able to judge the output from the ‘90s with clearer vision;  innovation may have slowed the pace of NCEs launched per year, but pipelines seem quite full from what benchmark analyses show.

In the meantime, improvement efforts will continue, and extraordinary discoveries in both academic and industrial labs are yet to come. The projected advances will hopefully justify the investments that have been made and allow us to recover the optimism that we very much need as extra motivation in our complex work. If we fail to see the fruits of our efforts, at the very least we should be proud of having tried hard with our best tools at hand.

Mutual Support
We in SBS will continue our quest towards successful drug discovery by providing  forums where we challenge our opinions and learn from each other. We need to encourage and nurture interactions among groups that have previously had difficulties in communicating effectively (e.g., academic and industrial labs or chemists and biologists) so that our collective knowledge can lead to the discoveries that the world and patients are waiting for.