Books: Eroom's law

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

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Today it stands at above $2.6 billion, although science writer Matthew Herper estimates it as $4 billion.18 In the 1960s, by contrast, costs per drug developed were around $5 million.19 Timelines, at least pre-Covid, are likewise extended. Eroom's Law shows that it takes more and more effort and money to develop new drugs. Achieving a pharmaceutical breakthrough is on a trend of increasing difficulty. Eroom is not a person. Eroom's Law simply reverses the name Moore, as in Moore's Law (the idea that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years, driving an exponential increase in computational power). If anything epitomises technological optimism it is Moore's Law.

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Indeed, the US saw consistent falls between 2015 and 2020, the biggest since 1915–1918, the years of the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic.14 In Britain a marked slowdown started in 2011, with no progress being made from 2015.15 At best, Britons are seeing the slowest improvements since the Second World War. The impact of coronavirus is certain to further revise down these numbers. At the frontier, something is going wrong with Pasteur-style breakthroughs. The drugs don't work; at least, not like they used to. The discovery of drugs appears to obey a rule christened Eroom's Law. In a nutshell, the number of drugs approved for every billion dollars’ worth of research and development (R&D) halves every nine years. This pattern has remained largely consistent for over seventy years.16 Since 1950, the cost of developing a new drug has risen at least eighty-fold.17 A Tufts University study suggests that the cost of developing a drug approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rose at least thirteen times between 1975 and 2009.

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Such advances are bolstered by powerful new fields like computational drug design.25 Health-related research now consumes 25 per cent of all R&D spending, up from 7 percent in the 1960s.26 Science, technology and economics all on the face of it imply that drug discovery should be speeding up and getting cheaper. Eroom's Law bucks the pattern that began with Pasteur. It suggests a steepening challenge that connects to the slowdown in life expectancy improvements. Every year it takes more money, researchers, time and effort to achieve breakthroughs. Each and every one of us is affected – our families, our friends, our basic quality of life.