With the cost of drug development hitting the $5 billion mark and 94 percent of drugs failing at some point in clinical development, pharmaceutical companies have been turning to new tools to help clinical trial design: computers and robots.
A couple of Wall Street Journal articles highlight this trend.
One notes that in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency endorsed a simulator from the Critical Path Institute to help develop Alzheimer’s disease treatments. Additional simulators are in the works for tuberculosis, Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.