What will the drug business look like in 25 years? Sure it's a bit of a parlor game, but also a way of getting one's bearings in a fast-moving field.
In a recent article in the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design, chemists Mark A. Murcko and W. Patrick Walters make their predictions for the year 2037 in the form of a piece of fiction about a beleaguered future drug hunter named Sanjay as he gets into a drunken New Year's Eve discussion with a nerdy rival. It's informative -- and a blast to read. To the researchers at Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, this world could induce a pretty terrible case of future shock.
Sanjay shuffled bleary-eyed into the expansive kitchen. “Lordy,” he groaned. One-thirty in the afternoon. Well, New Year’s Eve comes but once a year. Pouring himself some coffee, he sat at the table and took stock, his natural analytic bent slowly fighting to re-establish dominance. Through the floor to ceiling windows he looked out over a grey and gloomy London cityscape.
2037 was shaping up to be an important year for him. Although he was a widely respected academic, with a high Q-index, great SciDigg scores, three successful tenure renewals, and excellent student references, he knew that the game was changing. The world healthcare agency that was funding 80% of his lab was particularly interested in psychiatric illnesses. And he knew his chances of getting his biggest grant renewed next year were pretty poor if he didn’t come up with something good. He was among the best known of the “crossover chemists”—academic drug-hunters—and he had been paid handsomely for his past successes. But the bar was being raised: while in the past his rewards had come from finding leads, all the multi-national agencies (and the few remaining drug companies) were much more focused these days on clinical successes. Just coming up with cool new compounds didn’t get you very far any more. At this very moment, in fact, he had seven half-written grant proposals on his desk, all due by the end of the month. Hard to believe how much more time-consuming it was lately to scrounge for grant money than when he had started his career a quarter-century earlier. Those were fat times, indeed! Now he knew that if he didn’t keep up, even someone as well known as he was faced a real risk of losing his tenure at the end of his current 5-year contract.
