Two out of three?

Everyone wants drug development to be predictable. It’s not. So drug companies are forced to routinely bet billions on what are essentially coin flips. The latest example is Roche. The Swiss pharmaceutical company paid $47bn for the remaining shares of US biotech firm Genentech that it didn’t own, just before the results of an important clinical trial were announced. The drug, Avastin, failed to show it prevented the reoccurrence of disease in early-stage colon cancer patients. Roche lost it...