The oft cited $2.6B cost to develop a drug is derived from data from big pharma drug development programs. There is some evidence that startups are 5x more eff

The oft cited $2.6B cost to develop a drug is derived from data from big pharma drug development programs. There is some evidence that startups are 5x more efficient at developing drugs [0] The last several years have seen large increases in the number of new FDA approved drugs. The number of FDA approved drugs developed by big pharma is roughly constant, while the number being developed by startups is increasing AI can certainly help improve R&D productivity, but it is far from the only lever. Better risk management, clinical trial design, advances in protein engineering, larger genomic datasets analyzed with "traditional" statistical methods, better disease models, new therapeutic modalities, etc have all contributed to more efficient R&D productivity over the last decade and will continue to do so. But these don't get much attention outside of the pharma industry [0] https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/rd_bigpharma_startup.html https://www.baybridgebio.com/blog/rd_bigpharma_startup.html