Leveraging Research Failures to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development

Background Research failures are one of the most significant costs associated with the estimated USD$2.6 billion price tag and 12-year time frame to bring a drug from discovery to market. The European Commission estimates that USD$20 billion are spent every year to develop innovations that have already developed elsewhere, highlighting the exorbitant cost of duplication. The competitive nature of the pharmaceutical industry is such that the voluntary sharing of information is not particularly forthcoming despite the highly publicized advantages of open science, open access, and open innovation. However, sharing research failures may be perceived as less competitively threatening because it is considered ‘useless’ to the party owning it, but highly valuable to the competition.