ABSTRACT
A major consequence of the extended timescales in pharmaceuticals is that things commonly take much longer than ever expected to come to fruition. The most important feature of this is the great deal of time and cost involved before a new product reaches the market. According to IMS, by 2011 biologicals accounted for 23 per cent of total pharmaceutical sales, with the remaining 77 per cent being small molecule products. The concept of gene therapy was first proposed 40 years ago, but the exponential growth of publications did not occur until the late 1980s. It is only recently that the first two stem cell products have reached the market. First developed in the 1990s, in high-throughput screening (HTS), chemical technologists use robotic or other automated techniques to make very small quantities of hundreds or thousands of related chemical compounds.
