Beware the biotech hypeline

The process of turning a scientific discovery takes, depending on whom you ask, about 10 years and upward of $1 billion, the majority of which is spent on three sometimes arduous phases of human trials.

And yet, as STAT’s Kate Sheridan points out, when you look at the graphics biotech companies use to illustrate that process, you’re more and more likely to see incremental steps like “preclinical toxicology” equated with full-blown clinical studies. It’s a phenomenon called “hypelines,” and it seems to serve a simple purpose.

“All companies have that motivation to spin a more positive story so they keep getting funding, so they keep getting good researchers,” said Roberta Clarke, a health care marketing professor at Boston University, “so they are more likely to get what they need.”

Companies argue that atomizing the drug development process provides added transparency to investors. But whether that applies to reducing the years-long process of human testing to a single box called “clinical trials,” as Pantheryx did, is perhaps open for debate.

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