At the end of a very interesting article by C&EN's Stu Borman on the TIC10 kerfluffle (background best covered by Derek Lowe (natch)), a rather wonderful quote:
*Bowdlerized to avoid work firewall issues.
“I knew the whole TIC10 story would be an attention grabber,” Janda says, “but I did not anticipate so much blogging” about it. He believes the high volume of Internet discussion on the TIC10 issue to be, in part, “backlash from so many pharmaceutical companies having laid off their chemists and disbanded their medicinal chemistry divisions. Now we see how ditching the chemistry can really bite you in the a--.”*Quite so.
*Bowdlerized to avoid work firewall issues.
I think the little company which Janda scooped by patenting the correct structure was a dubious startup. They did not bother with many quite elementary things, the first of them was making sure that the press releases on the company website is free of spam.
ReplyDeleteSo the original provisional patent was left in bare-assed form, this looks like a rather typical academia licensing deal between a biology group that knows nothing about drug development, and a virtual company which needs to show a lead compound to impress the investors (but does not care to do any research on it).