Eroom's law

Definitions

The observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.

Examples

“Eroom's Law, in turn⟳, observes that in the pharmaceutical sector the decline⟳ in innovation is itself constant: the yield⟳ of FDA-approved drugs per billion dollars spent has halved every nine years between 1950 and 2010.”

“With a touch⟳ of wry humour, the authors dubbed this phenomenon Eroom's law, the reverse spelling of Moore's Law – the famous law of computing that expresses the doubling of processing power per dollar every two years […]”

“I first encountered Eroom's Law, the observation that biopharma productivity, measured as new drugs approved per billion dollars of R&D spending, has been steadily declining since the 1960s, halfway through my PhD. The fact that I completed a supposedly world-class undergraduate biology degree without ever hearing about this concept, and then spent another two years in a PhD program⟳ before discovering it, now feels damning. If anything deserves a place⟳ in Biology 101, it's the recognition that our ability to turn⟳ biological insight into effective medicines has been deteriorating for decades. Over time, I became somewhat obsessed with this problem. I also discovered that most biologists aren't. That lack of engagement, I think⟳, fuels a kind of magical thinking: the belief that simply doing “more and better science” will reverse the productivity decline⟳. But we have⟳ had more and “better” science for decades. Clearly, we need⟳ to start⟳ thinking about this differently. […] Earlier this year, I learned that Jack Scannell, who coined Eroom's Law, is similarly frustrated with the endless list of fashionable “solutions” that hand-wave past these fundamental problems. Since he has written at length about how to think⟳ about predictive validity, we ended up focusing on the importance of improving clinical trials […]”

CEFR level