In response to my last column, “Is Science Hitting a Wall?,” a reader sent me “Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency,” published in Nature Reviews in 2012. The paper by Jack Scannell and three other investment analysts is so clever and relevant to science as a whole that I’m summarizing its main points here.
Eroom’s Law. The paper notes that “the number of new drugs approved per billion U.S. dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950.” The authors call this trend “Eroom’s Law,” which is Moore’s Law flipped over. Moore’s Law is Gordon Moore’s famous observation about the growing power of computer chips. Scannell et al identify four factors underpinning Eroom’s Law. Here they are, with brief explanations:
The better than the Beatles problem. “Imagine how hard it would be,” Scannell’s group writes, “to achieve commercial success with new pop songs if any song had to be better than the Beatles, if the entire Beatles catalogue was available for free, and if people did not get bored with old Beatles records.”
Researchers seeking new drugs face a similar situation. “An ever-improving back catalogue of approved medicines increases the complexity of the development process for new drugs, and raises the evidential hurdles for approval, adoption and reimbursement.” The authors call this problem “progressive and intractable.”
The cautious regulator problem. Problems like the Thalidomide scandal in the 1950s led to stricter regulation of drug development. “Progressive lowering of the risk tolerance of drug regulatory agencies obviously raises the bar for new drugs, and could substantially increase the associated costs of R&D,” Scannell et al comment. “Each real or perceived sin by the industry, or genuine drug misfortune, leads to a tightening of the regulatory ratchet.”
The throw money at it tendency. Many companies have responded to competition by “adding human resources and other resources to R&D,” the authors note. They add that there may be “a bias in large companies to equate professional success with the size of one’s budget.”
Investors and managers are now seeking to slash R&D costs, according to Scannell et al. They caution that “lack of understanding of factors affecting return on R&D investment that contributed to relatively indiscriminate spending during the good times could mean that cost-cutting is similarly indiscriminate. Costs may go down, without resulting in a substantial increase in efficiency.”
The basic-research-brute force bias. Scannell et al define this factor as “the tendency to overestimate the ability of advances in basic research (particularly in molecular biology) and brute force screening methods… to increase the probability that a molecule will be safe and effective in clinical trials.”
Drug research has been transformed over the past few decades by breakthroughs such as the discovery of the double helix and of neurotransmitters, as well as the invention of powerful tools for decoding genomes and screening compounds. But the clinical payoff from these advances has been overrated. Look at the failure, so far, of the Human Genome Project to translate into improved therapies for inherited illnesses, or of knowledge about neurotransmitters to produce better psychiatric medications.
Dead Drug Officers. Scannell et al propose that to counter Eroom’s Law, drug firms should appoint a “Dead Drug Officer” to perform a post mortem on drugs that fail the R&D process. The officer would submit reports to the firm as well as to funding agencies and a peer-reviewed journal. These dead-drug reports would help identify ways to make research more productive.
I can imagine other fields designating a Dead Idea Officer, except that in some fields ideas never die. Look, for example, at the persistence of Freudian psychoanalysis in psychology and string theory in physics. The Dead Idea Officer could perhaps propose which ideas should be dead and hence cut off from further investment. That would be a thankless job, but someone has to do it, for science’s sake.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which belongs to the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one published on his Scientific American blog “Cross-check.”
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