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Unfortunately, the productivity of this research and development is declining. In the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have doubled their R&D spend. But the number of drugs approved has stayed the same. This means it costs much more to develop each approved drug. In 2010, it cost $1.2 billion to bring a new drug to market. In 2018, this increased to $2.2 billion. That's an 83% increase. Meanwhile, revenue per drug has declined. The result is that R&D returns have fallen by 80% since 2010, to 1.9% in 2018. This is unsustainable, and threatens continued health advances.

A significant contributor to this productivity crisis is preclinical research waste. Preclinical research is the stage in R&D before human trials. Waste at this stage not only increases drug discovery and development costs. It also increases the time before a new treatment can benefit humans. How much waste is there? One study estimates that half of preclinical research spending is waste. This amounts to $28.2 billion in the US alone each year—up to $48.6 billion globally.

The good news is that we know where the waste is. And we know how to solve it. About 36.1% of preclinical research waste is in reagents, for example. Reagents are materials such as antibodies used in life science experiments. When an experiment uses the wrong reagents, it may fail or produce unreliable results. Scientists spend a lot of time and money to search for and test reagents to avoid this. Even then, failure is common. When it happens, scientists have to repeat experiments. This all contributes to making drug discovery and development slower and more expensive.