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# Drug Development Returns Diminish Despite Rising Investment
- URL: https://adjacent.media/signals/drug-development-returns-diminish-despite-rising-investment/
- Published: 2026-04-23T10:02:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-23T10:02:02.000Z
- Description: The pharmaceutical industry now faces an inversion of Moore’s Law—spending more per drug candidate while cycle times and approval rates stagnate. Regulatory frameworks, not chemistry or computing power, have become the binding constraint on innovation.
- Author: Jonathan Greene
- Tags: #signal, theme-ai, automation, ethics

Source: [Works in Progress](https://open.substack.com/pub/worksinprogress/p/how-to-speed-up-clinical-trials)

The pharmaceutical industry now faces an inversion of Moore's Law—spending more per drug candidate while cycle times and approval rates stagnate. Regulatory frameworks, not chemistry or computing power, have become the binding constraint on innovation. Clinical trials are the bottleneck: patient recruitment relies on 1990s logistics, protocol complexity has expanded, and FDA risk aversion prioritizes process over outcome. Without regulatory reform or redesign of trial participant sourcing and management—synthetic cohorts, real-world data, adaptive protocols—the industry will continue investing in a system resistant to efficiency gains.