Explore the fascinating concept of Eroom’s Law, which highlights the rising costs of drug development compared to Moore’s Law. Discover how advancements in AI and data analysis are revolutionizing the industry, making drug creation more efficient. The discussion dives into the evolution of drug approval processes, emphasizing personalized therapies and agile trial methods. Listen as experts analyze recent trends, debating whether the tide is turning against Eroom’s Law and what this means for the future of biopharma.
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insights INSIGHT
Converging Factors in Drug Development
Three factors are converging to impact drug development productivity.
These include broader data sets, increased resolution down to single cells, and advanced computation.
insights INSIGHT
Engineering Drug Development
Escaping Eroom's Law requires engendering a sense of engineering in drug development.
This involves automation, reproducibility, and using machine learning to analyze data.
insights INSIGHT
AI and Automation in Drug Development
Interpretable machine learning can reveal not only the answer but also the reasoning behind it.
Automation can help control costs by reducing reliance on high-end skilled labor.
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Eroom’s Law is Moore’s Law spelled backwards. It’s a term that was coined in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article by researchers at Sanford Bernstein and describes the exponential decrease in biopharma research and development efficiency between the 1950s and 2010. Whereas Moore’s describes technologies becoming exponentially faster and cheaper over time, Eroom’s Law describes the trend of drug development becoming exponentially more expensive over time.
The article describing Eroom’s Law was published in 2012, and analyzed data up till 2010. That is perhaps ironic as 2010 appears to be an inflection point in the trend. In Breaking Eroom’s Law, the authors analyze the data since 2010 and show that costs appear to have stabilized over the last ten years. But what has contributed to this critical and exciting trend shift? In our conversation, Jorge and Vijay discuss the three causes cited by the authors of the Breaking Eroom’s Law article, their views on what technologies and policies will continue to push costs down, and their opinion on whether Eroom’s Law is broken for good.
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