Science for Health 2024 : Jack Scannell's Highlights
We were very honored to have Jack Scannell presenting his latest publication at 2024 Science for Health in Brussels on Novembre 12th. He also kindly shared his slide deck presentation after the event which you can download here.
R&D productivity is probably one of the most important sustainability indicators in the biopharmaceutical industry. It is also the primary focus of the TechBio revolution deploying tech-first, data-first, AI-first biology approaches to break Eroom’s law.
Eroom’s law has been coined by Jack Scannell to highlight the fact that developing new drugs is becoming increasingly expensive, in fact doubling every nine years since the 1950’s. This decrease in R&D productivity is attributed to three headwinds: The Better than the Beatles problem, a Regulatory Ratchet and the Abandonment or Exhaustion of Screening and Disease Models with High Predictive Validity.
Jack Scannell focuses on the third cause as this is the most tractable one. This model predictivity problem is evidenced by the fact that remarkably little change in clinical development success rates happened since the 1970s despite huge gains in scientific knowledge and brute-force efficiency. In his 2022 Nature Reviews publication, he shows that R&D productivity is even more sensitive to model predictivity than field experts think it is, with an absolute 0.1 change in predictive validity having bigger effect on positive predictive value than a 10x change in the number of candidates tested.
