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by etendue 3566 days ago
This is an absolutely incorrect assertion: drug discovery is but one part of the drug development process. You're ignoring (among other things) the work in medicinal chemistry, retrosynthesis, and scale up/chemical engineering that go into creating a drug. The compound at the end of the development process rarely looks like the one identified in initial screening, and the work done to manufacture it and bring it to market unquestionably count as inventive.