In his new Forbes column, titled “Four Reasons Merck’s R&D Restructuring May Not Save The Drug Giant (Or The Industry),” Dr. David Shaywitz – who earned his MD at Harvard and MIT – writes:
“Big pharma has become too bulky, too bureaucratic, insufficiently nimble – it can’t stop stumbling over itself. Although these descriptors are largely accurate, they may also not speak to the underlying source of the problem: inadequate understanding of the underlying biology. As smart as we think we are, and as much as we think we’ve learned, we really don’t understand the fundamental basis of most serious diseases – and even in cases where there’s a discrete underlying cause we can identify, human physiology is so unbelievably complicated that effectively targeting the problem can be prohibitively difficult, at least with our current understanding.”
The full story here: