> and of course with each new successful drug, the next one becomes progressively more difficult to find citation needed > as regulators become ever-more cons

> and of course with each new successful drug, the next one becomes progressively more difficult to find citation needed > as regulators become ever-more conservative ... cough the simple problem is that the drugs that work very well are hard (eg. personalized gene therapy) and there whole healthy-industrial complex is not set up to solve hard problems, it's set up to sell treatments to the market, keep the machine churning, buy promising new formulas from small research labs, do the larger trials, manage the FDA, market the shit out of those that make the cut, rework formulas to keep generics at bay, and so on. the other trivial problem is that no one wants to confront basic problems affecting health. (obesity comes to mind. nutritional studies are so underpowered it's laughable. also let's say mental health. tinkering with the brain always has the nasty side effect of oh what if the drug accidentally makes you feel funny/good instead of just not-miserable - see the weak results of the esketamine, also see how psychiatrists are afraid to use desoxyn [meth], because oh the paperwork & peer pressure.) note, I'm not saying that the current setup does not deliver results, and that your predictions are without merit. (they are realistic.) what I'm trying to make explicit is that the industry is already ripe for structural reform. (the easiest no-brainer would be to simply fast track drugs already approved by the EU EMA; tax waste spending [spending that is not R&D or manufacturing - eg. marketing/sales]; make the FDA approval process a lot more standardized and faster; start running publicly funded trials on drugs that are already prescribed by doctors but are not authorized to be marketed)