Eroom’s law (Moore’s law backwards) is a term coined by Jack Scannell et al. in 2012 to describe why drug discovery has become slower and more expensive over time. As summarized in the Wikipedia article, there are four primary causes proposed:
- The ‘better than the Beatles’ problem: Many conditions already have successful therapies and improvements over these existing drugs are likely to be modest(whereas the earlier drugs were often compared against placebos).
- The ‘cautious regulator’ problem: High-profile failures of drug regulation such as Thalidomide and Vioxx have are making regulators ever more risk-adverse.
- The ’throw money at it’ tendency: The default response to difficulties in drug discovery is to add resources, leading to cost overruns.
- The ‘basic research–brute force’ bias: Basic research has shifted toward high-throughput methods that may be nonetheless less productive (or at least overestimated in their effectiveness) than classical methods for discovering drugs that actually end up working in patients.
An additional idea (related somewhat to point #1) is that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. While it is a somewhat circular argument, it is intuitive that drug discovery is harder because we’ve already found many of the drugs that were easy to discover.
Speaking to the broader slowdown in meaningful scientific progress (at least relative to the volume of academic outputs such as journal articles), I recall somewhat once made a similar point about the low-hanging fruit, like relatively, having already been picked. Not that relatively was easy to discover, but the point is you can only discover it once!