Scarcely a day goes by that the Clinuvel team is not contacted regarding the latest conference: everything from monitoring to manufacturing to marketing is analysed, discussed and disputed across the globe in conference form. It’s impossible – and unwise – for small companies to try to attend all these forums, but it is equally impossible to work in the space without looking outside the office door: there is much to be learned from what others have done or not done to succeed in an industry fraught with failure.
And indeed there was much to take on at the recent World Orphan Drug Summit, held in Frankfurt last week. (more…)
Drug development is time consuming, expensive and fraught with risk. Setting aside commercial considerations, the scientific rational for the use of a drug and its introduction into the clinic requires a deep level of scientific and medical understanding in an environment which is continuously changing. The less common the drug class or clinical indication, the less likely one is to find individual experts who have the capacity to properly evaluate whether a drug is safe and effective for use in a clinical setting. Here one needs to learn while progressing, learning on the job due to lack of precedent.
When Andrew Pollack of the New York Times declared that the “world’s largest drug company is thinking small”, he wasn’t referring to reductions in sales force.
Effective communication is demanded more than ever in present-day drug development. I’ve blogged before about the role of patients in this process and the importance of acknowledging 
As snow begins to fall around Clinuvel’s European office, the team in Australia is preparing for a long hot summer. The seasons are at the forefront of our minds at Clinuvel, since our lead drug SCENESSE® appears to have a dramatic impact on the ability of patients to expose themselves to sun. We try to test the drug under the most extreme conditions, meaning trials must be conducted in spring and summer. As the seasons change, we begin to see more requests and enquiries from the southern hemisphere, in particular from patients with 
