Today's Wall Street Journal had a front page article on how Bayer could not replicate the results of 64% of 67 studies published in academic journals in trying to develop drugs based on what the journals said worked. Of particular interest to me was how Angen was going to develop a new cancer drug based on blocking the STK33 protein to deal with KRAS gene cancer because of studies published by Harvard Medical School in 2009 in the "prestigious journal Cell". After six months and a full team of researchers working on it, could not reproduce the results. In fact, the control group of cells had the same cancer growth as the blocked cells. The Harvard researcher has moved to Germany where she continues to claim that she can reproduce her results even though nobody else can.
According to the article, this is ultra common and that almost none of the cancer TX highlighted in the papers ever work out. The on line article is behind a pay wall and even though I'm a subscriber, I'm blocked from it for some reason.
There are lots of reasons, but WSJ speculates it is that the academic study authors, unlike pharmaceutical companies, rarely conduct experiments in a "blinded" manner. This makes cherry picking statistical findings that support a positive result more likely. As a result, the success rate of Phase 2 human trials -where a drugs' efficacy is measured, has fallen to 18% from 28% in the last two years.
The WSJ article is more nuanced than my summary
Charm