Since I began writing about the pharma business in 1999, I’ve been hearing that we’re heading toward The Era of Personalized Medicine. This means that, as we develop more knowledge of the genome, proteome, and metabolome, drugs will be tailored to generate greater efficacy or fewer side effects in smaller population groups. The product that gets touted as the advance guard in this wave is Herceptin, which can be very effective in treating breast cancer, but only in tumors that over-express the HER2 protein. Around 20% of breast cancer cases fall into this category; Herceptin isn’t effective against other tumors.

Now, some pharmacoeconomists contend that personalized medicine will lead to The End of the Blockbusters, as smaller patient groups translate to a cap on your “customer” base. On the other side of the spectrum is a “mass appeal” drug like Lipitor, the cholesterol treatment that sells more than twice the dollar amount of any other drug in the world and is now being tested for benefits in treating Alzheimer’s disease.

I bring this up because of N’Sync.

Recently, I read an odd article adapted from the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. It examines how the entertainment industry faces The Death of the Blockbuster. Anderson cites diminishing CD and movie sales figures and TV and radio ratings as indicators that the niche is where it’s at:

Anderson’s long-term economic arguments can be bizarrely off-kilter, or at least a little too optimistic about the prospects for “the little man” in this new world. For one thing, while social networking sites like MySpace have created a new model for publicizing music (among other things), News Corp. owns MySpace. The site may offer massive “niche” opportunities to musicians who don’t have a major distributor, but without a major corporation behind it, MySpace was going to burn out its “cool factor” (like Facebook is in the process of doing). As is, MySpace is making cash hand over fist for Murdoch & Co., both little (user fees) and big (as a promotional tool for its own properties).

For another, in this era where every entertainment option is allegedly losing its hit-making power, Anderson manages to avoid any mention of the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code phenomena. Both of these are such impossibly massive hits — despite the fact that more individual titles get published now than ever — that they blow a sizeable hole in the concept that we’re all “moving to the margins.”

It’s my contention that, while there a whole lot of factors at play in the decline of hits in the last five years, I think the biggest are that almost every blockbuster movie is awful, contemporary pop and dance music is so dull that radio stations needed to be bribed into playing it, and the current generation of TV executives were raised on the awful television of the late 1970s and 1980s.

So what does this portend for the drug industry? Well, hits might not be as big as they once were — we may not see another Lipitor but we may luck out and not see another N’Sync either — but they’re even more important to the both industries now, given the high price of failure and the cost of making a success. I’m not saying it’s right, as it tends to lead to “safe” committee-designed projects, but in the pharmaceutical business, as in Hollywood, the big hits help defray the costs of a ton of failures.

Gil Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its inception in 1999. He can be reached at [email protected]