Can’t agree with the premise. It seems that through changing regulatory regimes and technology a 1 in 10 chance is the economic optimum for this. Interesting stability, certainly, but I’d expect that as technology improves success rate, funding increases until the marginal project is unprofitable.

The better we get at doing things, the more ambitious we get. As an example, we can keep babies alive much earlier in gestation, so we try harder if they’re earlier than we would before. We should expect a homeostatic equilibrium between our skill and our ambition.

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s1artibartfast 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I 100% agree. the criteria for sucess is something that is missed by simplyifying things to a number.

Those failures can include drugs that would be considerer miraculous 10 or 20 years ago. You might have a drug that functionally cures HIV, but failed to outperform the standard of care in a RCT.

You have drugs like Lorbrena for non-small cell lung cancer where the median life extension is unknown because >50% of patients are alive 7 years out. Or Keytruda where 50% of advanced melenoma patients appear functionally cured 10 years post treatment.

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bonsai_spool 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

This comment makes no sense.

Why would anyone make a drug if the current prevalent treatment was as good as a functional cure?

What do lorbrena and keytruda have to do with the rate of failures being constant?

	▲	db48x 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		These are examples of ambitious drugs that wouldn’t have been attempted even a few decades earlier. But technology improved and the money was there so they tried anyway, and found success. But for any 3 successes there are still 27 failures because those 27 were equally ambitious.