On Tuesday, Eli Lilly unveiled a towering 346,000-square-foot laboratory in Boston’s Seaport District, a building that will house 500 of the company’s scientists — 300 of whom are still to be hired — who will focus on medicines that work by exploiting the basic mechanisms of human genetics. Another 200 people will be part of companies Lilly will incubate.
It’s a sizeable and conspicuous bet. It’s also the latest attempt to deal with one of the biggest challenges in drug development: What should a company do when it wins big?
Victory is hardly defeat. But inventing a mega-blockbuster — in this case novel drugs that treat obesity and diabetes — brings its own set of issues. The best-selling medicines in history have often left a shadow of research failure behind them, even when their makers shoveled cash into R&D as they never had before. There are many reasons for this. Distraction, because selling the biggest medicines in the world is distracting. Overconfidence, because big successes make executives take bets that are too risky. And bad luck, because developing drugs is both one of the most scientifically based activities human beings engage in and one of those most subject to random chance.
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