Drug development and open access: approaches and perspectives

Abstract

The development of a new medicine is a process that requires enormous time and tremendous financing. It takes 10-15 years from the discovery of an active compound to the launch of its production and the start of drug marketing with the total costs of the project reaching 1.8 billion US dollars. These large time and financial costs stem from repeated testing and elimination of a large percentage of compounds over the course of screening at each stage of preclinical and clinical trials. Many investors have lost interest in financing new drug discovery projects (or pharmaceutical start-up companies) due to the high risk and extensive time required to produce a return on investments. Since all the research data are considered confidential by pharmaceutical companies and thus never shared with scientific community, different scientific groups waste significant resources repeating the same costly experiments in drug discovery. In this article, we discuss new approaches to drug discovery involving open access to the research data and alternative financing that could significantly streamline the search for new cures for human diseases.