The drug discovery and development process, for a pharmaceutical company, costs $2 billion on an average. And it takes many years and even decades to bring a drug to the market upon the discovery. Despite the high risk involved in the process of drug development, many pharmaceutical companies work towards developing new drugs in order to improve the lives of people.
However, the biggest challenge for the larger pharmaceutical companies is that they don’t easily get approval from the FDA for their new drugs. In the year 2018, the costs for a pharmaceutical company to bring a drug to the market reached $2 billion with 12 years of development. In spite of over $50 billion of yearly investment on R&D work by the reputed pharmaceutical companies, the FDA only approves around 20 new chemical entities per year.
And this severely impacts the industry and limits the potential for blue-sky discovery research. Due to the uncertain returns on investment, the pharmaceutical industry chooses to target the already established markets and simply neglect ‘orphan’ disease research. It is important to address this concern so that the drug development companies manage to bring drugs for Ebola and other tropical diseases, which are spreading their network outside of developed countries.
