I hate to do another post on this subject, after a good part of the week has been devoted to layoff news and the like, but this one is too much to ignore. A reader sent along this link, which quotes a Morgan Stanley appraisal of the pharma industry as an investment. Here's what they're telling their clients:

. . .Still significant value in Pharma - we see material upside to ROIC [return on invested capital], earnings and multiples as Pharma withdraws from most internal small-molecule research and reallocates capital to in-licensing and other non-pharma assets. Worsening generic pressure and R&D management changes lead us to expect material cuts to internal small research spend (~40% total R&D) in 2010/11, after a decade of dismal internal R&D returns. We expect AstraZeneca (AZN) and Sanofi-Aventis (SNY) to be among the leaders in externalizing research, and this is a key driver of our upgrade of AstraZeneca today to Overweight.

Dimebon (dimebolin) is a perfect example of the black-box nature of drug research for the central nervous system. Any medicinal chemist who looks at its structure would immediately say "CNS", but shrug when asked what specific receptors it might hit. I'd have guessed histamine (correctly), since loratidine used to pay my salary, and I also would have guessed a clutch of 5-HT stuff as well. But it also has activity at AMPA and NMDA glutamate receptors, L-type calcium channels, and more. If you can tell me what it's really doing up there, you shouldn't bother: hang up on me and start calling people with money, because you're ready to take over the CNS therapeutic area for sure.

This blunderbuss is getting a lot of attention these days, since the data for a Phase III trial against Alzheimer's should be available sometime in the spring. The road to that was a strange one. Dimebolin was used for years as an antihistamine in Russia, although I'm not aware if it had any particular reputation for cognitive enhancement in its time as a Soviet allergy pill. It was picked up in screening done during the 1990s at a research institute in the (once secret) military/industrial research city of Chemogolovka Chernogolovka, about two hours from Moscow. It showed effects on learning in rodent models, and gradually advanced to human trials for Alzheimer's. Impressive data came out in 2008, and Medivation, who own the rights to it here, partnered with Pfizer (PFE) for development.