Exceptions exist of course, and some of these bets turn good purely because of luck (if you take twenty random chemicals and inject, one of them might just cure cancer; incidentally how stuff like paclitaxel & vinblastine was discovered anyway). But this only seems to reinforce the conviction of these institutions to continue their methods.
One of the most important differences I feel VCs should acknowledge as a contrast between tech and biotech: with tech you can often choose one method of solving a problem and make it work. With biology however, nature will eventually give you a roundhouse kick if you try to force anything but an actual solution down it’s throat.
Vinblastine was discovered from folk tea remedies for diabetes. In animal models they saw decreased white blood cell counts.
Paclitaxel was discovered from the NCI plant screening program. The chemical was observed to be cytotoxic in screening studies.
So both of your examples have pre-clinical evidence. These were not randomly injected and developed through scientific research and the clinical trial program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer_chemotherapy
Paclitaxel was discovered literally from a random spray and pray scan of plant samples from every taxonomic class, here I will quote a literal sentence from a review: “ Barclay collected T. brevifolia, an evergreen, apparently because the strategy was to collect at random. Not much was known about the tree. It belonged to the genus Taxus...” (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry... )
So I still believe in what I said, which is random screens or complete serendipity often has been the best ways to get t a lot of our therapies, though I’m not advocating for more of that necessarily.
Take Janelia farms for example- without reading their editorialised website if you try to gander what the hell this institution is trying to do, from just the papers they publish, you would fail miserably. Not saying that institution sucks, well I suppose I am saying that, but only insofar because all of academia seems to suck in the same way.
I’m pretty sure they do basic science for medicine, with many of the same goals as the NIH.
TINA. If you're a fund that needs to put an ass in a seat to say "we have a biotech investment", you go to whatever you can find. You have no way of doing due diligence in your portfolio and even if you hired someone like me to ultrafilter your proposals you'd probably come up empty, because the only postdocs that play this game are those that know they are good at parlaying their social capital, obtaining favorable reviews from their PIs (social validation), and have less scruples.
The heads down brilliant and honest scientist postdocs have already burnt out, and often aren't socially savvy enough to play the VC game, if they were, they'd be gunning for faculty positions instead.
If VC wants a better return they need to have a different heuristic. I'd pick postdocs that did years of grueling work with no results and ask them what they'd really prefer working on instead of their PI's hairbraned idea.
I wish I could find it now, but I once read a comment on HN where someone was approached by a VC for technical advice. To make a long story short, the engineer being consulted noted that in order for their growth to continue as the company proclaimed, they would have to break the speed of light before reaching profitability. The VC invested anyway and inevitably the company failed.
VCs chase trends just as much as anyone. In my experience, they are more susceptible to herd mentality than regular people.
That said, I could see computational drug design being helpful in particular circumstances solving very specific issues. But the idea it’s going to wholesale change the way drugs are designed and speed up the drug discovery process are very, very optimistic and the landscape is riddled with failed promises over the past 40 years.
No, no you won't. If your offering a tool that fixes a specific issue I'm facing, then ok, I'll listen. But scientists don't take well to bullshit.