Big Pharma in Crisis

The last 30 years have brought new technologies to biomedical research, such as the computer simulation of biological systems and machine learning. Despite that, the pharmaceutical industry is in a crisis; only rarely are new "blockbuster" drugs being discovered. This makes me seriously wonder whether the new technologies are overhyped, and it also makes me pose myself the question whether it is a good idea to keep focused on computational systems biology or whether I should invest my sparetime in some other pursuit. I currently maintain the Web Portal on Computational Biology and I have read quite a lot of papers on the subject already, yet perhaps the whole field is not that promising at all.

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