InCrowd’s co-founder, Diane Hayes, Ph.D, shares her story, with Onco’Zine, of a battle with invasive ductal carcinoma and four approaches to innovation that can help with the multi-year drug development process.
I developed a sense of outrage at the convoluted, friction-filled, multi-year drug development process. Frankly we all should. It costs U.S. $ 2.6 billion to bring a drug to market and between 10 years to as many as 30 years—while patients are dying. Scientific rigor is critical in drug development, yet why a decade to apply said rigor so that it can help?
The drug development process is missing the iterative development that tech leaders have adopted years ago. By tackling small changes quickly, and often in parallel, reams can react and process through unexpected surprises in an agile manner.
We need to stop looking for sources of massive transformation, and apply innovation from tech companies at focused, incremental points that don’t reinvent the wheel—just offer a better, faster, and in most cases, cheaper approach to traditional methods with very few, if any, tradeoffs. Here’s are four examples.