Are we in denial about the state of drug discovery? This is a question I recently asked a room full of leading thinkers from the pharmaceutical, academic, and nonprofit worlds assembled for a Wellcome Trust meeting on precompetitive boundaries in drug discovery. At the time, I certainly thought so. The current system for drug discovery is unsustainable, but I expected that the experts assembled here would rather ignore the facts than admit that the entire system is in need of major disruptive innovation. I wondered if the crisis were enough to shock people into agreeing to revolutionize the system of drug discovery with changes that will disrupt some of its very foundations.
One such change involves crowd-sourcing aspects of understanding diseases. We desperately need better predictive models of disease that are actionable at the molecular level. Better models will result in better targets. These models will require integration of clinical ...
