David Shaywitz

A main theme of this column – perhaps even the dominant theme – is how to operate in a power-law domain like drug development where there are few, outsized successes, where most efforts end in failure, and where it’s incredibly difficult to predict in advance how you are likely to fare. Earlier this week, I discussed the parallels between film... Read More

Film and pharma, like many creative endeavors, exist in a world of power law economics, where a handful of exceptionally successful products account for a massively disproportionate share of the total revenue.  Consequently, in both domains, there’s a powerful incentive to “pick winners.” Every studio head and every R&D leader tries desperately to do this.  But there’s a problem: as... Read More

Pharma colleagues: does this complaint sound familiar? This company is too bloated. It’s too slow. We have all these layers and layers of bosses where leaders at the top would decide on the strategy, and then it would just trickle down to the people who actually did a lot of the day-to-day work…. I am 10 layers below the CEO... Read More

As Bostonians tentatively emerge from the bleak cold of another New England winter and begin to search for signs of spring, we instinctively turn to the Red Sox.  Unfortunately, I am informed by my daughters that the team’s prospects appear dismal this season, so we’ll need to look elsewhere for hope. We might consider instead Boston’s other great preoccupation: biomedical... Read More

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review Death To Beauty, a new book by Dr. Eugene Helveston. It’s about the fascinating history of botulinum toxin and the California ophthalmologist, Alan Scott, who drove it into clinical use. The book review, of course, speaks for itself, but I wanted to highlight for TR readers an aspect of the story that... Read More

Spurred by several questions I’ve received from students and trainees, today’s year-end column examines some of the ways large biopharma companies are fundamentally different from small biotech companies and startups.  We’ll also ask whether biopharma can overcome new technology’s dreaded “productivity paradox” and learn, quickly, how to apply AI to accelerate drug development. Large Pharmas vs Smaller Companies (Including Startups)... Read More

Architects and Gardeners Most leadership offsites I’ve attended have included some flavor of personality assessment – not so much to formally classify us, but rather to make the point that different people have different styles, and to emphasize that you can’t assume everyone you work with approaches the world the same way you do.  In this spirit, I wanted to... Read More

I can’t stop thinking about a recent series of poignant blog posts, written by an emergency room physician affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. Her husband has been battling a terrible cancer – recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.  Given what she does for a living, the author, Dr. Bess Stillman, is about as well-positioned to be a savvy patient... Read More

My Ground Truth Every other week, I stroll across the Longfellow Bridge from Cambridge to Boston. It can be a magnificent walk in the fall and spring, when the weather is temperate and the skies clear. You can see the deep blue of the Charles River, the Esplanade on your left, with the Boston skyline behind it, and the Citgo... Read More

Two recent Wall Street Journal deep-dives nicely bookend a critical, and unresolved, tension faced by large pharmaceutical companies: how can their R&D organizations discover, develop, and deliver the new medicines patients await, and the growth and return on investment that shareholders demand? Early this year, I discussed an April 2023 profile of Lilly by journalist Peter Loftus, who described how the company, led by a physician-scientist... Read More

Generative AI, the transformative technology of the moment, exploded onto the scene with the arrival in late 2022 of chatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot developed by the company OpenAI.  After only five days, a million users had tried the app; after two months: 100 million, the fastest growth ever seen for a consumer application. TikTok, the previous record holder, took nine... Read More

As the excitement around generative AI sweeps across the globe, biopharma R&D groups (like most everyone else) are actively trying to figure out how to leverage this powerful but nascent technology effectively, and in a responsible fashion. In separate conversations, two prominent pharma R&D executives recently sat down with savvy healthtech VCs to discuss how generative AI specifically, and emerging... Read More

Today, we’ll begin with a consideration of the promise for AI some experts see in healthcare and biopharma. Next, we’ll look at some of the obstacles – some technical, some organizational – and re-visit the eternal “data parasite” debate. Finally, we’ll conclude with a few suggestions for summer reading. The AI Opportunity: Elevating Healthcare for All Earlier this month, I... Read More

Biopharma relies on innovation to stay in business. Success depends on our collective ability to discover, develop, and deliver new products that cure or meaningfully mitigate disease over and over again. Patents allow for innovators to be rewarded, for a while. When patents expire, allowing us to purchase powerful generic medications like atorvastatin for pennies, manufacturers must come up with... Read More

The worlds of technology and entrepreneurship are captivated by recent advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs).  The arrival of ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI (a startup partnered with Microsoft), caused Google to declare a “Code Red,” akin to “pulling the fire alarm,” the New York Times explained. The latest class of startups at Y Combinator are reportedly flocking... Read More

In 1935, Astounding Science — the premier science fiction magazine of the day, and perhaps ever — published “Proxima Centauri.” It was a short story envisioning an encounter between a voyaging earth spacecraft and a ship from a nearby star system. Written by Murray Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins), the tale features the original use of the phrase “first contact” in... Read More

Biopharma, like the rest of the world, appears to be on the threshold of profound, technology-induced change. Incredible advances in artificial intelligence, manifested most recently in GPT-4, are here.  This technology, Ezra Klein explains in the New York Times, “changes everything.”  Bill Gates describes it as “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface,” and declares, “the... Read More