LESSONS FROM THE SURPRISING FRAGILITY Beware the False Fail The Endo and Folkman stories illustrate not only the Three Deaths but also a specific type of death, one common to loonshots. The failure of Endo’s drug in rat models (Death #2), for example, nearly terminated his program at Sankyo. The same failure permanently killed a similar program at another company, Beecham Pharmaceuticals. Beecham later merged with SmithKline & French, and then Glaxo Wellcome, becoming today’s GlaxoSmithKline. Had Beecham persisted, they might have shared in the $300 billion of revenues from statins. Even a
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