It’s hard to get a fix
I always recommend people to read David Healy’s Psychopharmacology 1, 2, and 3, together with Jack Scannell’s articles (here and here) to get a feel for exactly what drug discovery means. What is beyond doubt is that we are not as efficient at it as we once were. There is lots of blame to go around. The following gives a flavour of some of the issues ( or at least one take on the core issues).
From a review in ‘Health Affairs’ of A Prescription For Change: The Looming Crisis In Drug Development by Michael S. Kinch Chapel Hill (NC): University of North Carolina Press, 2016, by Christopher-Paul Milne.
He chronicles these industries’ long, strange trip from being the darling of the investor world and beneficiary of munificent government funding to standing on the brink of extinction, and he details the “slow-motion dismantlement” of their R&D capacity with cold, hard numbers because “the data will lead us to the truth.” There are many smaller truths, too: Overall, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding has fallen by 25 percent in relative terms since a funding surge ended in 2003; venture capital is no longer willing to invest in product cycles that are eleven or twelve years long; and biotech companies may have to pay licensing fees on as many as forty patents for a decade before they even get to the point of animal testing and human trials….
In an effort to survive in such a costly and competitive environment, pharmaceutical companies have shed their high-maintenance R&D infrastructure, maintaining their pipelines instead by acquiring smaller (mostly biotech) companies, focusing on the less expensive development of me-too drugs, and buying the rights to promising products in late-stage development. As a consequence, biotech companies are disappearing (down from a peak of 140 in 2000 to about 60 in 2017), and the survivors must expend an increasing proportion of their resources on animal and human testing instead of the more innovative (and less costly) identification of promising leads and platform technologies. Similarly, some of academia’s R&D capacity, overbuilt in response to the NIH funding surge, now lies fallow, while seasoned experts and their promising protégés have moved on to other fields.