The projects drug companies wish they’d never started
Failures are common in drug research, but some are bigger than others
Drug discovery has some real success stories, and you can find many accounts of these in the literature. There are papers, speeches at award ceremonies, career retrospectives when longtime researchers retire and so on. But what doesn’t get recounted in anything like this level of detail are the projects – or even the whole therapeutic areas – that the scientists involved wished they’d never heard of or thought to work on. Examining these programmes provides a perspective that’s missing from the Greatest Hits repertoire