[User23]

A competent medicinal chemist can spend a lifetime in drug discovery and never get a candidate molecule out of clinical trials. I learned this from the excellent Derek Lowe, whose blog at http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ is on my daily list.

Quote from an interview[1]: "I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and I have never once put a drug into a pharmacy. I tell people: “If you want to know why your prescriptions cost so much, it’s me.” I’ve done nothing but spend money the entire time."

[1]https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/05/derek-lowe-chemist-blogg...

[hannob]

> “If you want to know why your prescriptions cost so much, it’s me.” I’ve done nothing but spend money the entire time."

Sounds nice, the best evidence we have disagrees: https://news.ohsu.edu/2017/09/11/how-much-does-it-cost-to-br...

[aaavl2821]

That's a widely criticized study because it ignores the cost of failure. It only looks at the r&d investments of companies that received FDA approval for a drug. It's like doing a study of the odds of winning the lottery, and only analyzing people who won the lottery

Considering the fact that 90% of phase 1 drugs never get approved and that study seems quite biased. That study conveniently assumes that all those medicinal chemists, who've worked decades and never seen a drug approved, simply don't exist

[User23]

Interestingly this contributes to why drug companies spend so much money on advertising: it has a predictable measurable return, whereas R&D is virtually a lottery.