Drug Development

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends approximately $100 billion annually to develop new pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices. Today, a successful new drug takes on average 15 years and more than $1 billion to bring to market.

One reason for the high cost and long development cycle is that current animal models are used exclusively to test drug safety because they are poor predictors of patient response. As a result, the only way to determine drug efficacy is through human trials which are slow and expensive to conduct.