Clinic-in-the-Loop - by Ruxandra Teslo and Asimov Press

For the last several years, I have been trying to understand why biomedical progress, especially in therapeutics, has become less productive despite staggering advances in basic science. I am not the only person vexed by this. In 2012, biotechnologist Jack Scannell formally described the dwindling returns on therapeutic investments, coining the term Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law in reverse). Eroom’s law states that the inflation-adjusted cost to bring a new drug to market roughly doubles every nine years: a trend that has held since the 1950s. With the goal of upending Eroom’s law, I have spent the last year studying the structural bottlenecks that shape how new medicines are tested and the FDA’s role in such decisions. Much of my time has been focused on clinical trials, which, despite their central role in the creation of pharmaceuticals, receive remarkably little systematic attention. This led me to launch the Clinical Trial Abundance Project, a framework aimed at increasing not only the

For the last several years, I have been trying to understand why biomedical progress, especially in therapeutics, has become less productive despite staggering advances in basic science. I am not the only person vexed by this. In 2012, biotechnologist Jack Scannell formally described the dwindling returns on therapeutic investments, coining the term Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law in reverse). Eroom’s law states that the inflation-adjusted cost to bring a new drug to market roughly doubles every nine years: a trend that has held since the 1950s. With the goal of upending Eroom’s law, I have spent the