Drug Development Expenses Contribute To Rising Medicine Costs, Wall Street Journal Reports

The Wall Street Journal on May 2 looks at how the increasing difficulty of discovering new medicines is a "big reason the price of drugs is surging." Although the drug industry has spent a combined $200 billion on drug research in the last decade, 24 new drugs were approved last year -- the lowest number since 1994. Few of those drugs are expected to have "blockbuster" potential. New treatments have been hard to find in part because pharmaceutical companies have already "unearthed many of the easiest cures and treatments" and because it is difficult to manage research divisions that have "ballooned after a wave of drug industry mergers." Pharmaceutical company executives say the "high rate of research failure" for new drugs adds to the high cost of new drugs. The cost of research "increases astronomically" with each step in the drug development process, the Journal reports (Hensley, Wall Street Journal, 5/2).