Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dfsegoat 233 days ago
To put some numbers to trying to develop a single therapy (where candidates etc. will fail as you try them)

- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D

- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.

...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00043-x

https://greenfieldchemical.com/2023/08/10/the-staggering-cos...

3 comments

$180-500M+, doesn't sound that much really. You can barely get a decent ballroom for that.
Or a bad marvel movie.
That's ballroom + bunker, you prole
Are you trying to say that Pharma R&D is ~ $10-20B to yield 1 approved therapy? 10 * $1-2B "at bats" = 1 run?

Honestly it doesn't sound that bad considering these pharma revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_com...

not bad at all - it would not be bad if it was 5x+ that...
According to your numbers, Moderna got lucky at a 10% chance of producing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in 48 hours of computation? I don't know, but there seems to be more factors at play.

https://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=57148.php

Moderna got lucky in that we know enough about that virus that the chance of a COVID-19 vaccine was a lot more than 10%. The more general case of a drug is a lot more than specific one