David Brooks, "Death and Budgets": An Invitation to Come to Compugen

In his New York Times op-ed entitled "Death and Budgets" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/opinion/15brooks.html?hp), David Brooks bemoans the fact that billions of dollars are being wasted by the US government to prolong life by a couple of months, but no new meaningful cures are on the horizon. Brooks writes:

"The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs. We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care we are radically improving the quality of our lives. We have the illusion that through advances in medical research we are in the process of eradicating deadly diseases. We have the barely suppressed hope that someday all this spending and innovation will produce something close to immortality."

I have said this time and again in this blog, so I will make it short:

I am convinced that the failure of the pharma industry to create meaningful new medicines owes to the fact that they have all been doing the same high throughput and ultra high throughput experiments, i.e. throwing ever larger libraries of chemicals at drug targets at ever higher speeds, without taking the time to understand biological phenomena at the molecular level.

A decade ago, a tiny Israeli biotech company named Compugen predicted that Big Pharma would hit the wall in its drug discovery efforts, and undertook a long lonely effort to create discovery platforms which could accurately model biological processes at the molecular level and enable the computerized prediction and selection of therapeutic and diagnostic product candidates. Foreseeing that the era of trial and error in the world of drug discovery was yielding diminishing returns, Compugen sought to harness advanced mathematics and computer science to create the next generation of drugs addressing unmet medical needs.

Today, at a time when Big Pharma's pipelines are going dry, Compugen has an ever expanding pipeline of early stage therapeutic candidates aimed at unmet medical needs. Compugen's candidates are not intended to extend life by a mere month or two, but rather provide meaningful therapies where often none exist. Moreover, Compugen's computerized ability to identify new drug candidates is swift and costs a tiny fraction of what is required by other pharma companies to discover new potential products (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/search/label/Compugen).

A concrete example of Compugen's predictive capabilities? Consider how they arrived at their candidate for multiple sclerosis ("MS") and rheumatoid arthritis, CGEN-15001, described in my September 7, 2010 blog entry (http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2010/09/cgen-15001-predictive-discovery-and_07.html).

Mr. Brooks, I'm inviting you to visit Compugen to learn about their cutting edge science. Alternatively, let's have a conference call. It should prove an eye-opener for you.

[As noted in prior blog entries, I am a Compugen shareholder, this blog entry is not a recommendation to buy or sell Compugen shares, and in mid-September 2009 I began work as a part-time external consultant to Compugen. The opinions expressed herein are mine and are based on publicly available information. This blog entry has not been authorized or approved by Compugen.]