In the early days, most drug discovery (while amazing for its time) covered comparatively simpler diseases with arguably less complex physiological and pharmacological models i.e. low hanging fruit. Many of these diseases (e.g. Type 2 Diabetes) are still improperly addressed to this day. But they are not as lucrative for today's pharmaceutical company as they used to be in simpler times.
Governments and insurers are too astute to pay excessively for incremental improvements in mass or lifestyle disease categories. It makes more business sense for Big Pharma to target complex, hard-to-cure diseases that affect a small population set. While the success rate for such molecules is much lower, it's also much harder for payers to apply their usual mass-oriented drug economics to them.
One of the better examples of this is the recent introduction of Hep C "curing" drugs. Sponsors are going uncontested in pricing their molecules up to $84,000 per patient year[1,2].
With 3 million patients in the US alone, that's a TAM of $252 billion per year. For one drug category.
Governments and insurers are too astute to pay excessively for incremental improvements in mass or lifestyle disease categories. It makes more business sense for Big Pharma to target complex, hard-to-cure diseases that affect a small population set. While the success rate for such molecules is much lower, it's also much harder for payers to apply their usual mass-oriented drug economics to them.
One of the better examples of this is the recent introduction of Hep C "curing" drugs. Sponsors are going uncontested in pricing their molecules up to $84,000 per patient year[1,2].
With 3 million patients in the US alone, that's a TAM of $252 billion per year. For one drug category.
References:
[1] http://hepatitiscresearchandnewsupdates.blogspot.com/2014/03...
[2] http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/senators-s...