Drug Discovery Is a Costly Process
Drug discovery is the branch of science which deals with the design and discovery of drugs. The design of novel drugs is concerned with the various fields like medicine, pharmacology and biotechnology. In the earlier days, discovery of drugs was done by recognizing an ingredient in the traditional medicine. The drug discovery in those days was accidentally made. Today, the discovery of drugs was done by studying about the disease and the infection caused at a physiological and molecular level.
Drug discovery is a process which carries out primarily the recognition of candidates for the drugs, their synthesis, characterizing them, screening them and conducting in Vitro studies to learn about its efficacy. If the chemical compound has passed the tests in all these steps, it will go for developing into a future drug. This drug that is developed will be later used for clinical trials.
There are major breakthroughs that have occurred in the recent past regarding the improvement in the technology used for drug discovery. Though the technology supports this process effectively now, the drug discovery was observed as an expensive, lengthy and inefficient process. The research done for the purpose of the discovery of a new chemical entity spent around US$1.8 billion.
For the drug discovery to go smoothly, it is necessary to know about the various drug targets or disease causing defective proteins. To understand about the targets properly in every disease, it would be convenient if the entire knowledge about the human genome is exposed. As the project on human genome has revealed about every gene and its encoding details, it has become easy for the scientists to remove the barriers in identifying the therapeutic targets. Difficulty in identification of targets has been a problem since some time for initiating the drug discovery process. Human genome project has diminished that limitation.
There are new targets and established targets. Choosing new targets might be difficult for the drug discovery cycle as they do not have the known history and pathway in the biochemical aspect. The genes involved in their synthesis will not be clear. In the case of established targets, it is easy for designing the drug based on it, as the target is already established with enough information.
The designing of drugs can be done by In-Silico methods which take very less time for generation of lead molecule. The lead molecule that is designed can be sent later to the synthesis and it can be tested for its target inhibiting ability. This will prove the ability of the drug to even restrict the disease. The lead molecule can be used for screening purpose by using a technique called “High-throughput screening” or popularly called as HTS.
In this process of HTS, the various chemicals which are similar to the designed lead molecule can be used for matching with the inhibiting properties against the desired target. This is done by using them in in-vitro studies. The chemicals which are found to be having target inhibition properties will be screened. This compound can be made to undergo pharmacophore and structure-activity relationship studies.
If the compound shows enhanced activity against the desired target, decreased activity against the unrelated target, and possess ADME properties it can be selected for further tests. The quality of the compound can be tested using Lipinski’s rule of five. Apart from high-throughput screening virtual throughput screening is also done to bring the leads very fast into the picture. Lead generation is also done using combinatorial chemistry. For this procedure many of the natural products from the plants and animals can be used for development of drugs against bacterial infections. Ultimately the discovered drug will be synthesized and sent for clinical trials to be released into the market successfully.
Product Manager Must Innovate Can Perform discovery and Not Lose their Shirts
What’s your plan for making your product a success going forward? Hoping some magic fairy shows up and makes your competition go away overnight? Well good luck with that! I suspect that your management is probably pressing you and your product team to do some of that “innovation” stuff. Got any ideas on how to make it happen?
The Two Flavors Of Innovation
We all think that we know what innovation is, but do we really? We view innovation as being the process by which successful products get invented like the iPhone, the Kindle, etc. However, those product teams have access to some sort of magic pixy dust that the rest of us can’t touch. How are we supposed to use innovation to make our products better?
Really smart people, like Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, have taken a close look at this innovation thing and they’ve discovered that not all innovation is created the same.
What they’ve found is that there are actually two different types of innovation. The first is what we’re all familiar with: the blockbuster breakthrough thought. This is the kind of thinking that produced the iPad. Not bad – if only product managers could have these types of thoughts every day!
Thankfully there is another type of innovation. This is the incremental change type of innovation. It’s a much smaller type of breakthrough, but we have a lot more of them and they turn out to be just as important.
For you see, the blockbuster breakthroughs are built on top of a whole bunch of incremental breakthroughs. In fact, the researchers have discovered that you really can’t have a blockbuster breakthrough if you don’t have a bunch of incremental breakthroughs in order to support the blockbuster.
How To Innovate With Your Product
I can almost hear you saying, “oh great, so now not only do I have to have blockbuster innovations, but now I also have a bunch of incremental innovations…” Well, yes and no.
Instead of getting all tied up in knots about what you do or don’t have to do in order to innovate with your product, it might be simpler to implement a framework for allowing innovation to happen.
One way to do this is to look at innovations as they relate to your product as being organized in a pyramid fashion. At the base of the pyramid are all of the little ideas that are always popping up about how the product can be improved. These can come from anywhere: internally or from customers.
The ideas that are “no-brainers” need to be implemented right away. The ones that will require some time and investment, but which look promising should be thought of as moving to the next layer of the innovation pyramid.
At this level, investments are made, changes happen, and innovation starts to become apparent in different parts of the product if you look at it hard enough. Nothing revolutionary, but the product does keep getting better.
The final stage of the pyramid is the top. This is where the big ideas get kicked up to. These ideas require the product manager and the firm to make a big bet on where the world is headed. If your senior management agrees, these ideas are the ones that will create the breakthrough innovations for your product that everyone will be talking about.
What All Of This Means For You
Since you are responsible for the success of your product, you need to make sure that both you and your team keep innovating and making the product better and better. That means that you’re going to have to find ways to make innovation happen.
It turns out that there are more than one type of innovation. There are the big innovations that get all of the press and then there are the incremental innovations that are needed to allow the big innovations happen.
Product managers need to implement a framework that allows innovative ideas to be collected into a pyramid of innovation that will allow good ideas to be implemented no matter if they are small, medium, or breakthrough in size.
Innovation is a core requirement for every product – every product has a half-life and you need to be adding value to it in order to ensure its success. Use this deeper understanding of innovation to show your management and the market that your product is the most innovative.
The World Needs Think Tank Idea Inventor
Sometimes I think that the patent process causes a disconnect with the communication of new innovative ideas, and that it actually hurts inventors more than it helps them. It seems everyone is afraid to talk about their new invention or innovation until they get a patent, because they don’t trust fellow humans to steal their idea or patent for themselves, or go start making money without them. Nevertheless, many inventors I’ve talked to have had ideas or applications for innovations that are not all that unique.
What they consider to be an original thought, really isn’t. Perhaps what the world needs is an inventor’s think tank, a place where people can go register their ideas within the group, and talk over their innovations with other inventors, along with the potential applications in the real world.
Not long ago, I was at one of those Mega-Box-Bookstores, sitting in the coffee shop and sipping on a Latte. I was paging through a great book titled; “The Art of Invention: The Creative Process of Discovery and Design,” by Steven J. Paley, published by Prometheus Books, New York, NY, (2010), 236 pages, ISBN: 978-16161-4223-0.
The author goes into what makes an invention great, and helps the reader to define what an inventor actually is, and the process they use to do their inventing; as well as how to apply their creative genius in such a competitive commercial rat race. The book is as intellectual and philosophical as it is instructive. It’s a book that I would recommend reading. The author himself is an inventor of sorts, and obviously knows what he is talking about.
The author is also an entrepreneur, and several of his inventions have made quite a bit of money. For almost 3 decades he’s accumulated experience in both technology and business. He holds quite a few patents and is currently teaching engineering and robotics to mentally superior children, with extremely high IQs. It almost sounds as if he has created his own inventor’s think tank for the next generation of creative geniuses.
After reading through this book, it occurred to me that maybe adults and grown-ups who consider themselves leading edge inventors, and hyperspacing innovators need a place to go to hone their skills and meet with fellow like-minded individuals. I do recommend that you read this book and think about what the author has to say, and then perhaps if you agree with what I’m saying; that there needs to be a place for innovators to congregate, that you will think about this some more. Please consider it all.