The main issue is money; A lot of the articles you’re reading are basic research and funded by government agencies. The average grant that a lab receives is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which sounds like a lot until you look into how much developing a drug costs, which is in the billions of dollars. There are orders of magnitude between a science grant and how much it costs to develop a drug, and a research labs aren’t equipped to deal with that difference. However, scientists still do manage to bring compounds to the market! Which is good, that’s the reason we’re doing this research.
So say you’ve developed a compound and you want to bring it to the market. The most common path (based off my understanding) is to partner with a drug company because they do have the billions of dollars to develop drugs. You’ll need to do a lot more animal studies to reallly make sure your drug is doing what you think it is (which is more money). One issue with a lot of basic research is that it doesn’t get replicated enough by a single paper. So when you read “researchers at university x discovered compound y” there hasn’t been enough replication for a drug company to jump on board because, again, it costs billions of dollars to bring a drug to market, and they don’t want spend a lot of money on something that doesn’t work.
But, your compound is really promising, the mechanism of action is confirmed by multiple lines of evidence and now you can start trials in humans. You’ve spent a few million at this point. The application for the FDA is really complicated, and now you’re going to need a legal team (which is money, see the common theme here?). The most common animal model is mice, so while your compound may have worked in mice, there’s no promise it’ll work in humans (as mice and humans are differently), so you need to do multiple rounds of testing. This is the really expensive part, which I don’t know a lot about besides it costs a lot of money, and mice and humans are different so lots of compounds drop out. You also need a lot of people in these trials, which is a lot of money. The reason compounds are so expensive to develop is that we really want to make sure we aren’t killing people when we try and help them, so drug companies need to be very thorough.
Hopefully this was somewhat informative. The tl;dr is that compounds are really expensive to develop because we don’t want to kill people
goalposthead452512 karma
The main issue is money; A lot of the articles you’re reading are basic research and funded by government agencies. The average grant that a lab receives is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which sounds like a lot until you look into how much developing a drug costs, which is in the billions of dollars. There are orders of magnitude between a science grant and how much it costs to develop a drug, and a research labs aren’t equipped to deal with that difference. However, scientists still do manage to bring compounds to the market! Which is good, that’s the reason we’re doing this research.
So say you’ve developed a compound and you want to bring it to the market. The most common path (based off my understanding) is to partner with a drug company because they do have the billions of dollars to develop drugs. You’ll need to do a lot more animal studies to reallly make sure your drug is doing what you think it is (which is more money). One issue with a lot of basic research is that it doesn’t get replicated enough by a single paper. So when you read “researchers at university x discovered compound y” there hasn’t been enough replication for a drug company to jump on board because, again, it costs billions of dollars to bring a drug to market, and they don’t want spend a lot of money on something that doesn’t work.
But, your compound is really promising, the mechanism of action is confirmed by multiple lines of evidence and now you can start trials in humans. You’ve spent a few million at this point. The application for the FDA is really complicated, and now you’re going to need a legal team (which is money, see the common theme here?). The most common animal model is mice, so while your compound may have worked in mice, there’s no promise it’ll work in humans (as mice and humans are differently), so you need to do multiple rounds of testing. This is the really expensive part, which I don’t know a lot about besides it costs a lot of money, and mice and humans are different so lots of compounds drop out. You also need a lot of people in these trials, which is a lot of money. The reason compounds are so expensive to develop is that we really want to make sure we aren’t killing people when we try and help them, so drug companies need to be very thorough.
Hopefully this was somewhat informative. The tl;dr is that compounds are really expensive to develop because we don’t want to kill people
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