Life everything in this industry, people keep waiting for that magic bullet, but I have yet to see one.

Will be interesting to see where this goes. Investors often lack the patience that is required for a small company to grow into a drug company.

As for Numerate, of course, I don’t have any better sense than anyone else whether their in silico technology actually works the way they claim. I am pretty sure, though, that it’s a lot easier to raise money as a developer of therapeutics than it is as a service or contract business in this industry. Numerate sounds like it’s partnering out of hard experience, but since it’s also pursuing its own candidates and already debating whether to keep them exclusive or partner them, the company doesn’t seem to have ruled out the possibility of becoming a drug company itself.

It’s not quite correct to say that rational drug design has not yielded any drug candidates. Yes it might be hard to pick one drug and say “this exists because of rational design”, but on the other hand at pretty much every pharma company computational chemistry/molecular modeling are part of the discovery process.

There are also too many examples of in silico companies trying to become drug companies based on a computational platform. Based on my own experience, that’s just not a feasible model. I’d love to be proven wrong, but such companies are likely to find much more success if they functioned as service providers. In an increasingly outsourced/virtual pharma business, my suggestion is that that companies like Numerate would be likely to be much more successful as part of a larger company where there technology provides a competitive advantage, or as a boutique service provider to the pharma industry which is always in the hunt for good molecules.