Eroom's Law is Moore's Law spelled backwards. It's the bitter name in the pharma industry for the fact that R&D costs per drug have been steadily rising since the 1950's.
The funnel has been made at least a thousand times larger; initial screens now look at millions of compounds, compared to thousands in the days before HTS.
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Since there's been no improvement in the rate of clinical trial success, this tells us that the highly automated modern preclinical pipeline is thousands of times *less predictive* than the old manual process was.
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The authors cite "molecular reductionism" as a related problem. "Nearly all drugs are sold with a biological story...“drug x works by binding receptor a, which influences pathway b, which adjusts physiological process c, which alleviates disease d.”"
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Obviously, most hypotheses of this form turn out to be false. A drug discovery process that starts with screening for molecules that bind a target will be futile if the disease does not depend solely on that target (which is usually the case.)
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Of course, this is what target validation is meant to discern, and there's a lot of good science in this field. But failure is normal in science.
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The target-based paradigm means that, for instance, basic researchers were making discoveries that raised doubts about the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's *decades* before amyloid-targeting Alzheimer's drugs failed in the clinic. That's expensive.
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