Digital strategies in research and development (R&D)

Within a few years, we have seen a dramatic transformation at the interface between digital technologies and biopharmaceutical research. The decoding of the human genome was believed to herald the beginning of an era of bioinformatics, yet many of the companies founded to provide computational services in drug discovery did not do at all well. This serves to illustrate that digital strategy in R&D is certainly not immune to the vagaries of therapeutic innovation. Drug development, always a risky business, is becoming increasingly complicated and expensive. The pharmaceutical industry’s spending on R&D has increased from less than 10 per cent of sales in 1970 to approximately 20 per cent in 2000 [21, 23], and overall R&D spending has tripled since 1990 (Figure 5.1). The industry estimates that each approved drug must return between $300 million and $600 million to cover the cost of the failures [22].