At the beginning of the summer, I had the opportunity to join the team at Royalty Pharma for a great event at MIT (link here). It was an interesting time for me as I was thinking about the new role I was about to take at Bristol Myers Squibb. While I had certainly been “a leader” for several years now, I was pushing myself to think through and question my perspectives on R&D now that I was taking on increasing responsibilities as “the leader” of the research organization. And so the presentation opportunity with Royalty really pushed me to articulate my views in a way that would hopefully ..read more

[I am an employee of Celgene. The views expressed here are my own.] In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy clicks her heels and hopes for re-entry from her dream world by repeating, “There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…” I often feel that many in the genetics community look at their human genetics data with the same youthful optimism as Dorothy – clicking their genetic heels and wishing “my genetic discovery will become a drug…my genetic discovery will become a drug…” But without rigor and discipline, such heel-clicking won’t overcome many of the challenges that face drug hunters along ..read more

[I am an employee of Celgene. All views expressed here are my own.] At the 2018 Annual Atlas Ventures Retreat (AVR), I participated in a panel on Digital Health (along with David Schenkhein, John Reed, Scott Brun). The panel discussion was led by Michael Ringel, who also provide an excellent introduction to Digital Health (his slides here). While there are many aspects to digital health, we focused on the application to drug discovery and development.  In this blog, the main point I want to emphasize is that I believe that the digital health tipping point will occur when products that ben ..read more

For me, the most enjoyable aspect of discovery research is exploring the unknown. It is about having a big idea; believing in that big idea based on a scientific belief framework; coming to a crossroads in the validity of the big idea, which is usually marked by deep uncertainty and skepticism; making a data-driven scientific decision to proceed (or not) to the next inflection point of testing the big idea; and ultimately arriving at a conclusion of whether the big idea is true. Unfortunately, most of these scientific adventure stories are lost in the way we communicate about science. We tell ..read more

[ I am an employee of Bristol Myers Squibb. The views expressed here are my own, assuming I am real and not a humanoid. ] In the original Blade Runner (1982), Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, implements a fictitious Voight-Kampff test to measure bodily functions such as heart rate and pupillary dilation in response to emotionally provocative questions. The purpose: to establish “truth”, i.e., determine whether an individual is a human or a bioengineered humanoid known as a replicant. While the Voight-Kampff test was used to establish truth for humans vs replicants, the concept of “truth” is ..read more

[Disclaimers: I am an employee of Bristol Myers Squibb. The views expressed here are my own. Also, I am not a particularly good poker or chess player. It is one reason I am a popular invited guest to poker nights with friends.] I posted on poll on Twitter to ask the question is drug discovery more like poker or chess. There were over 300 responses, with the results split nearly equally (54% poker, 46% chess). My answer to the question, “Is drug discovery more like poker or chess?”, derives from the following truths: Poker is a game of skill and chance, where critical information ..read more

[Disclaimer: I am an employee of Bristol Myers Squibb. The views expressed here are my own.] One of my favorite questions to ask is: “What captures your imagination?” At a recent family dinner, responses were varied but encouraging for the next generation: black swan events, comparative anatomy & human physiology, space exploration & intelligent life beyond our planet, and more. My response was programmable therapeutics, a topic which I have blogged about in the past. In this blog I define programmable therapeutics and provide a few recent examples (severe combined immune deficiency an ..read more

(Disclaimer: I am an employee of BMS. The opinions expressed here are my own.) Do you ever wonder what leadership skills are required to advance an idea from concept to the precipice of regulatory approval? In this guest blog, Dr. Kristen Hege, senior vice president of Early Clinical Development, Hematology/Oncology & Cell Therapy at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), describes a harrowing tale hiking in the Sierra Mountains and what it taught her about leadership.  For background, Kristen has been working on cell therapies for more than two decades (link to BMS profile here, Nature Medicine ..read more

[I am an employee of BMS. The views expressed here are my own.] The blog is long, so I will start with an executive summary. (You can download a pdf copy of the blog here.) Pharmacologic intervention has the opportunity to impact disease progression in the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 crisis. Repurposing of approved therapies is the fastest way to impact patients today, as these medicines have regulatory approval to enable investigator-initiated trials and have a manufacturing process to ensure drug supply. Here, I focus on a specific clinical inflection point in COVID-19 disease progression – hospit ..read more

[I am an employee of Bristol-Myers Squibb. The views expressed here are my own.] One of my predictions for the next decade – the “clear view” decade – is that we will have the ability to click on any gene in the human genome to generate function-phenotype maps. These maps should enable drug discovery by informing on mechanism, magnitude and markers of target perturbation. In particular, I have championed an “allelic series” model, whereby genes with a series of alleles are used to derived genetic dose-response curves (see here, here). During a recent presentation to my former colleagues at the ..read more