The primary problems with drug development are self-evident from the data. Firstly the process of drug development has become enormously more expensive over the past seventy years, a period in in which rapid technological progress has diminished the cost and effort required for any task in pharmacology and biotechnology by orders of magnitude. Secondly, the pace at which useful new medicines emerge in the clinic has diminished considerably, over the same period of technological progress in which the bounds of the possible have opened up enormously. The article I’ll point out today is well worth reading, a lengthy treatment of these problems and the various viewpoints on what has caused the present dismal state of drug development. I am not sympathetic to the argument that drug development has become inherently harder for technical reasons. I am sympathetic to the viewpoint…
A Lengthy View of Everything that is Wrong with the Drug Development Industry
The primary problems with drug development are self-evident from the data. Firstly the process of drug development has become enormously more expensive over the past seventy years, a period in in which rapid technological progress has diminished the cost and effort required for any task in pharmacology and biotechnology by orders of magnitude. Secondly, the pace at which useful new medicines emerge in the clinic has diminished considerably, over the same period of technological progress in which the bounds of the possible have opened up enormously. The article I’ll point out today is well worth reading, a lengthy treatment of these problems and the various viewpoints on what has caused the present dismal state of drug development. I am not sympathetic to the argument that drug development has become inherently harder for technical reasons. I am sympathetic to the viewpoint…