Why Are Drugs So Expensive? One Reason: Scientists Can't Reproduce Each Other's Work

Dr. Moshe Pritsker ran up against one of the most aggravating problems in science as he embarked on his doctoral research in molecular biology at Princeton University. He was trying to reproduce an experiment on embryonic stem cells that he had read about in a journal. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not replicate the original experiments findings.

After several colleagues also came up short, he hopped on a flight and spent two weeks working alongside the scientist who completed the original work. There in the lab, Pritsker was able to witness the researcher's methods firsthand and eventually learned enough to replicate the findings, but he was left feeling frustrated by what the ordeal meant for his field.

The whole premise of science is that it's reproducible, he says. Science is not a science if it's not reproducible.

Its an unglamorous truth of scientific inquiry -- researchers consistently fail to reproduce each others experiments. While any scientist should, in theory, be able to replicate the findings of another based on the scientific method, the reality is that most results are not nearly so reliable.Their frequent failures slow the pace of innovation and ultimately cost researchers at universities, government agencies and companies time and money.

Pharmaceutical companies in particular are worried that this challenge will continue to push their costs, and therefore prices, to ever-higher levels. Drug research has grown increasingly less efficient in recent decades andDr. Ulo Palm, chairman of the research committee for food and drugs at the American Society for Quality, suggests that a lack of reproducibility is at least partly to blame. The number of Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs the pharmaceutical industry pumps out for every billion dollars it spends on research and development has dropped by 50 percent every nine years since the 1950s in a trend known as Erooms Law. Today, it costs $2.6 billion to usher the average drug to market, which is more than double the cost from a decade ago, according to a recent analysis from the Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University.

Meanwhile, the amount of medical literature generated by researchers in the field is doubling every five years.

We know so much about modern biology but somehow, we don't seem to be able to turn it into real treatments because our resources are wasted on trying to reproduce work that is faulty in the first place, Palm says.

Starting in 2002, scientists at Amgen tried to replicate 53 landmark scientific studies. A decade later, they published a paper noting they could only confirm the findings of six. Researchers at Bayer run up against this problem in roughly two-thirds of the studies that they try to validate when seeking new treatments for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

If you look at whats happened to human health over the last couple of decades, researchers have made enormous improvements -- that's not in dispute, C. Glenn Begley, a former Amgen scientist who published a record of the companys attempts to replicate landmark research, says. What's concerning to me is that we could have made so much more progress. Its that opportunity cost that is frankly impossible to quantify.

Palm has also confronted the issue himself. In the mid-1980s, he failed to replicate an experiment having to do with kidney physiology during his doctoral research and later, while working for Novartis, he assumed responsibility for controlling the quality of the in-house experiments and improving the rate of reproducibility -- a position created to make research spending more efficient.

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Why Are Drugs So Expensive? One Reason: Scientists Can't Reproduce Each Other's Work