Rediscovering Existing Drugs

There's been a lot of talk lately about unlocking the hidden value from existing products, that is, drugs that have gone all the way from pure discovery, through the FDA regulatory process and into the hands of patients. These are the industry's greatest assets; they've already distinguished themselves from millions of other compounds by passing the myriad tests related to disease relevancy, safety, efficacy, and more safety, since safety isn't ultimately known until drugs disseminate through the treatment population, years after approval. Recently, there's been a shift to applying the industrial revolution in de novo drug discovery--the tools for screening and assaying libraries of random compounds-to existing drugs, as companies look for new products by reprofiling, repurposing, and redirecting the development of old drugs.

Here's a business proposition for you. It's going to take from 10-15 years to get each product to market. It will cost, on average, $802 million to do so, but very few products will top $1 billion in sales. Oh, and eight out of ten projects will fail at any point from year 1 to year 20. Does that sound like a sane business?

Companies in drug discovery, which have accepted these odds in the past, are increasingly coming to the realization that there's...

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