Question: how many new drugs do you make a year to help people

Jess Smith answered on 17 Mar 2014:

Drugs take a really, really long time to make!!! And the vast majority of drugs that are designed in the lab don’t ever make it on to the shelf.

The process is that you have an idea of what might help cure a disease, then you have to test it in a lab- see how you can make it, see if it behaves how your predicted it would. This could take years and could fail at any point (for example maybe you thought it would attach to a certain chemical, but in fact it doesn’t), you have to tailor it and tweak it to see how it changes the behaviour. Once you know that it does what you wanted, then you have to think about how to get it in the body and whether you need to change how you make it to make sure it is safe. Then you have to test it on animals, which takes a very long time. Then you have to run human clinical trials. The drug could fail at any of these points, sending you back to the drawing board!

It could take 20 years, with lots of different people working on it to get the drug to market, and it would probably be nothing like the idea that the first scientist had!