Failure Is Built Into Pharma. But It’s Complicated: Brainstorm Health

Hello and happy Friday, readers!

As promised, we have a special guest post up today on Fortune.com – from IDEA Pharma CEO Mike Rea and co-author Eneida Pollozi.

This fascinating piece tackles some of the most pressing issues in drug industry and, specifically, in an area that’s dogged some pharma companies for a while now: Namely, failure.

As Mike and company write, failure is inextricably linked to the drug development enterprise. Risk-taking is the name of the game and, sometimes, you just get unlucky.

The thing is… It’s way more complicated than that. For instance, “When so many studies ‘fail’ for their ability to recruit patients, we of course might wonder why. The reasons are legion, from over-promising by hard-tendering contract research organizations (the third-party firms hired to do the major leg work for many pharma companies), to lack of a true unmet medical need, to difficulty getting patients to trial sites, or possibly a study that would put a control group at a disadvantage.”

Our expert guest authors go on to note that companies can have wildly differing incentives that determine whether or not they choose to ditch an experimental drug. And those incentives may not necessarily be aligned with whether or not a treatment ultimately works out for patients.

I highly encourage all of you to read these important insights. Here’s a link to the full piece.

Read on for the day’s news, and have a wonderful weekend.

Sy Mukherjee, @the_sy_guy, sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com

DIGITAL HEALTH

An inside look at Livongo's company culture. Livongo president Jenny Schneider has diabetes. In fact, nearly half of the workforce at the digital health firm (which went public just last week) has a chronic condition - and it drives the strategy of the company's essential strategy. To note just one example: "What it comes down to is the day to day— how it feels to walk in the shoes of the members," said Chris Mack, a former Deloitte consultant and type 1 diabetes patient since age 10 who is now a client strategy manager at Livongo, in a telephone interview. "If someone is running into an issue or needs clarification, you know that people [at Livongo] understand what they’re dealing with on a personal level, and that they’re going to be responsive to their needs." Read the full write-up on this employee-influenced strategy here. (Fortune)

THE BIG PICTURE

A small victory for science? From anti-vaccination campaigns to denial-ism about all sorts of well-established scientific norms, it's easy to think that science has just kind of, well, fallen by the way side in the public debate. But NPR points to a new poll finding that trust in scientists - specifically, that a significant portion of the public thinks they work in the public's best interest - has actually spiked over the past three years. Admittedly, that may not be enough to combat deliberate efforts to discredit mainstream scientific thought. (NPR)