The current system of clinical research, diagnosis, and treatment is failing the billions of people are suffering from chronic diseases.
It takes over 10 years and 2.6 billion dollars to bring a drug to market (including failed attempts). It costs $41k per subject in Phase III clinical trials.
The high costs lead to:
1. No Data on Unpatentable Molecules
We still know next to nothing about the long-term effects of 99.9% of the 4 pounds of over 7,000 different synthetic or natural compounds. This is because there's only sufficient incentive to research patentable molecules.
2. Lack of Incentive to Discover Every Application of Off-Patent Treatments
Thousands of drugs were found to work for other diseases after the patent expired. Unfortunately, there is no financial incentive to do any more research on them at this point.
3. No Long-Term Outcome Data
It's not financially feasible to collect a participant's data for years or decades. Thus, we don't know if the long-term effects of a drug are worse than the initial benefits.
4. Negative Results Aren't Published
Pharmaceutical companies tend to only report "positive" results. That leads to other companies wasting money repeating research on the same dead ends.
5. Trials Exclude a Vast Majority of The Population
One investigation found that only 14.5% of patients with major depressive disorder fulfilled eligibility requirements for enrollment in an antidepressant trial. Furthermore, most patient sample sizes are very small and sometimes include only 20 people.
6. We Only Know 0.000000002% of What is Left to be Researched
We've only studied 0.000000002% of the 166 billion potential medicinal molecules.
