>>13711182>Why is pharmaceutical research and development so expensive?A company starts with perhaps 100 new compounds a year. Quickly many are discarded because they don't work or kill lab animals.
Testing progresses with various animals and at any stage many compounds are dropped. Early fail is cheap, late fail is costly.
Finally we get to clinical testing and humans. This is high risk, people might die, which is why you already did 5 - 10 years of lab and animal testing. Still at this stage compounds are dropped.
Then, after perhaps 20 years of development the compound is submitted for marketing permissions. This can be denied.
If granted you can still have the permission withdrawn, see Vioxx.
And all this sunk cost of hundreds of failed compounds have to be paid for by the one or two compounds that do work. And this is extremely expensive and time consuming.
