A manifesto for reviving biopharma productivity

I first encountered Eroom’s Law, the observation that biopharma productivity, measured as new drugs approved per billion dollars of R&D spending, has been steadily declining since the 1960s, halfway through my PhD. The fact that I completed a supposedly world-class undergraduate biology degree without ever hearing about this concept, and then spent another two years in a PhD program before discovering it, now feels damning. If anything deserves a place in Biology 101, it’s the recognition that o...