Pharma Blog Watch

Developing Kinase Inhibitors (In the Pipeline)
In his blog, Derek Lowe discusses oncology drug trials. "Cancer drugs have a terrible history in clinical trials. The most definitive figure, from development candidates of the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s or so, was a cold, hard, 95 percent failure rate," he writes. "But I wonder if that figure still holds."

"Starting later on in the 1990s, and gathering speed ever since, a lot of the small-molecule drug candidates in the cancer area have been kinase inhibitors," he continues. "I would not want to hazard a guess as to how many kinase inhibitors have gone into development over the past 10 or 12 years. … I will guess, though, that they haven't failed at quite that horrific 95 percent rate, and that a 1995-2010 survey of the field will show an improvement."