“In general, the investment needed in discovery to carry out all the work to identify a potential new medicine can range from $25 to $30 million. This is what it takes just to get to Phase 1. Interestingly, these early costs tend to be fairly standard because it generally takes the same number of scientists and similar resources to discover a new drug for rare diseases as it does for drugs to treat the most prevalent conditions. Similarly, Phase 1 testing also tends not to vary among new medicines and so these studies amount to $10–$15 million per compound. At Phase 2, costs vary depending on the information that is needed to justify the major Phase 3 trials. Thus, a Phase 2 program can cost between $60 and $100 million. However, all of the costs to this point are dwarfed by the ultimate Phase 3 program. Before Phase 3, perhaps as many as 500 people have been studied with the new drug. Phase 3, however, involves thousands of patients in many different complex studies and testing for periods that can last for years. The large investment in Phase 3, anywhere from $400 to $800 million, requires full approval at the highest levels of a company.”

John LaMattina “Drug Truths”

Roivant, funded by Softbank. Unbundling and efficiency come to Pharma R&D

“Roivant goes looking for drugs stuck in turnaround—not because of problems with the science, but because of corporate changes-of-plan. “Once we take over those drugs, the same cultural attributes that allowed us to focus on specific drugs rather than general therapeutic categories allow us to focus on the process by which those drugs can be accelerated to the finish line,” Ramaswamy says

Drugome: Roivant has mapped 30,000 potential drugs, 2,000 mechanisms of action, and 10,000 endpoints this way—all from publicly available, mostly free databases.