Tackling the Bottlenecks in the Drug Development Pipeline

Can you believe the average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug currently averages about 14 years? That is WAY too long. Even more shocking is that the failure rate exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug surpasses $2 billion, after adjusting for all of the failures. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences was specifically established one year ago to apply innovative scientific approaches to the bottlenecks in the pipeline. An example of game-changing innovation is the NCATS collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a biochip for testing drug safety. Devices like this and other tissue chips may someday reduce the amount of animal and human clinical trials necessary to determine if a drug works. That could be a huge step toward making drug development faster and cheaper—which is better for all of us.