One of the major developments that have occurred over time—and it is both important and costly—is that the science is getting better. We are getting much better at understanding how diseases work, how illness conditions work, etc. However, that means that the folks whom we would be developing drugs to treat are more complicated and that we have to design our trials in ways that are very different from those in the past. That makes the clinical trials part of the drug discovery journey much more expensive than in the past.
Today, Tufts University in Massachusetts, which generally maintains the biggest database on the cost of R and D for pharmaceuticals, estimates that the average drug coming to market—this is worldwide cost, mind you—cost about $2.6 billion U.S. The vast majority of that is in clinical trials, because of the costs and sophistication of those trials. As we get more targeted in our populations, we have to do a lot more sophisticated trials to show the evidence that they work.