Right now, investing in drug development is just a bad use of resources. There's a huge amount of variation in clinical practice using the drugs we already have

Right now, investing in drug development is just a bad use of resources. There's a huge amount of variation in clinical practice using the drugs we already have. A lot of that practice is undoubtedly sub-optimal or actively harmful, but we just aren't funding research into how we use old, boring, generic drugs. If you go into cardiac arrest, you may or may not be given epinephrine. Some hospitals use it in their resus protocols, some don't. Nobody knows whether it works, but it's the subject of heated debate at anesthesiology conferences. Some trials suggest that it's marginally effective, others suggest that it reduces long-term survival rates. There's conflicting evidence on timing and dose. As you teeter on the threshold between life or death, someone might be giving you a drug based on decades-old studies performed on dogs, some clinical guesswork and a bunch of inconclusive research. For the price of one drug that offers a few extra months of life to a handful of patients with a rare form of cancer, we could resolve several of these clinical debates. http://anesthesiology.pubs.asahq.org/article.aspx?articleid=1917810 http://anesthesiology.pubs.asahq.org/article.aspx?articleid=...