ABSTRACT
The competitive challenges in today’s R&D environment and global marketplace are forcing organisations to be more responsive, agile and efficient than ever before. Arguably these challenges are more dominant in the development of drugs in the biopharmaceutical industry. It is estimated (DiMasi et al. 2003) that 7 out of 10 drugs brought to market never generate enough revenue to recover the average cost of development. The average drug development cost has increased from $500 million in 1996 to nearly $1 billion in 2002. Figure 7.1 shows a hypothetical pipeline for pharmaceutical R&D that would provide one launch in a given year. The discovery pipeline needs to be considerably larger to keep the development pipeline filled.
