Simulations Plus

Several large Pharma companies have announced interest in acquiring small biotech companies. Many Pharma companies have reduced or eliminated drug discovery efforts, and with stock prices back at 2003 levels, there certainly is a great deal of sense in these acquisitions. But finding another way to integrate these companies and their development portfolio also makes a great deal of sense.

John Muir was one of the first climbers to explore and climb many of the peaks in Yosemite Valley in California’s High Sierra. During his first ascent of Mount Ritter in 1872, he became gripped with fear.

A kerfuffle is the polite term for a cascading series of errors that can be initiated by a seemingly innocuous event that then leads to other errors that seem to gain in severity and impact. Kerfuffles can appear in any line of work or play that involves a linked series of tasks with downstream implications. In fact, the modeling and simulation activities performed to support model-based drug development have the potential to produce a catalogue of kerfuffles that can culminate in the failure to deliver modeling and simulation results when they are needed for decision-making. Kerfuffles often have their origins in inadvertent oversights committed early in the study design and data collection process or in the commonplace shortcuts taken to deliver preliminary (“quick-and-dirty”) results for internal use.