Company timeline
Eighteen months, from eleven people to four hundred and twelve. Fourteen entries, including the ones we would rather not have had to write.
This timeline includes a programme we abandoned and an event that went wrong. A timeline that contains only good news is a marketing document rather than a record, and it is usually obvious which one you are reading.
What happened, in order
What a timeline leaves out
Almost everything. Eighteen months of work compresses badly into fourteen lines, and the compression is not neutral — the entries that survive are the ones with a date attached, which systematically favours filings, clearances and openings over the slow work that made them possible. There is no entry here for the eleven months of medicinal chemistry that preceded the first investigational new drug application, and there is no entry for the assay development without which none of the chemistry would have meant anything.
The abandoned rabies series is on this timeline because leaving it off would misrepresent how the work goes. There were more potent compounds in that series than the one we took forward, and they were not taken forward, because they did not get into the brain. That is the ordinary texture of drug discovery and it is worth saying out loud, because a timeline of successes gives a reader a false model of how often this works.
The August entry is written in exactly the terms of the published statement and adds nothing to it. We will not expand on it here, in an interview, or in response to a request. When the independent review reports, what can be published will be published; we are not going to pre-announce what that will contain, and we are not going to give a date.
The full record is in the document library
Twenty-six cleared documents and one hundred and thirty-nine pages, each with a Disclosure Review Board reference, a public revision number and a count of the sections withheld from it.