From Mr Gustav Ando.

Sir, While pinpointing some of the inherent problems of the pharmaceutical industry business model, David Shaywitz and Nassim Taleb (“Drug research needs serendipity”, July 30) oversimplify matters by urging the industry to “resist the false comfort of revenue predictions” and “resolve to look uncertainty in the face”, as if the two approaches were mutually exclusive. This is to assume – wrongly, I hazard to say – that the inability to predict pipeline success is not one of the biggest headaches for pharma executives, and also that valuation spreadsheets do not incorporate this uncertainty.