R&D Matters – The Five Top Research & Development Stories of 2016

If you take the temperature of R&D productivity you get a good indicator of the health of the pharma and biotech industries, making new drug development stories a perennial favourite with Scrip readers. Here we take a look at the five biggest R&D stories this year.

Biopharma In Perspective 2016-2017

The top R&D story of the year, in the eyes of Scrip readers, was the disaster that befell Portuguese company Bial-Portela & CA SA when one volunteer died and several others were hospitalized during a Phase I trial of its novel inhibitor of FAAH – known as BIA 10-2474 – for various neurological conditions. Indeed, this was one of the top stories of the year, and is detailed in the companion piece 2016The Pharma Year In Review. But failures in other trials provided the more usual drug development tragedies for other companies and, by extension, the patients who lost a potential life-saving treatment option.

Chief among these was the surprise failure of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s PD-1 inhibitor Opdivo in the much-anticipated CheckMate 026...

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