Question: Why is it so hard to make a new medicine?

James Beswick answered on 16 May 2020:

Great question! I may have mentioned in the chat that a successful medicine can take over 10 years and cost over $1 BILLION to develop… and that’s just the successful ones! The process has many steps and goes from early stages like identifying a particular target and developing useful molecules to test in cells, right through to late stages like clinical trials (where the drug is tested in humans!). If you imagine the shape of a funnel, that’s a bit like the drug discovery process. LOADS of molecules start the process, but they are narrowed down as they go through each stage until you go from millions of potential compounds down to just one… As you can imagine, this is why it is so difficult! There is a really nice summary on the United States FDA website (https://www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-drug-and-device-approvals/drug-development-process).