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Estimating The Cost Of New Drug Development: Is It Really $802 Million?
Abstract
This paper replicates the drug development cost estimates of Joseph DiMasi and colleagues ("The Price of Innovation"), using their published cost estimates along with information on success rates and durations from a publicly available data set. For drugs entering human clinical trials for the first time between 1989 and 2002, the paper estimated the cost per new drug to be 868 million dollars. However, our estimates vary from around 500 million dollars to more than 2,000 million dollars, depending on the therapy or the developing firm.
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Citations
Cited by
Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry: New estimates of R&D costs
DiMasi, J. A., Grabowski, H. G., & Hansen, R. W. (2016) · Journal of Health Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.01.012 · Cited by 3,359
Estimated Research and Development Investment Needed to Bring a New Medicine to Market, 2009-2018
Wouters, O. J., McKee, M., & Luyten, J. (2020) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2020.1166 · Cited by 1,531
The productivity crisis in pharmaceutical R&D
Pammolli, F., Magazzini, L., & Riccaboni, M. (2011) · Nature Reviews Drug Discovery · doi:10.1038/nrd3405 · Cited by 918
Preclinical Mouse Cancer Models: A Maze of Opportunities and Challenges
Day, C.-P., Merlino, G., & Van Dyke, T. (2015) · Cell · doi:10.1016/j.cell.2015.08.068 · Cited by 676
Cunningham, C., Ederer, F., & Ma, S. (2021) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/712506 · Cited by 452
Metadata
- Authors
- Adams, C. P., & Brantner, V. V.
- Venue
- Health Affairs
- Publisher
- Health Affairs Publishing, LLC
- Published
- 2006-03
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 420-428
- ISSN
- 0278-2715 (ISSN-L)
- 1544-5208
- OpenAlex
- W2166209362
- Cited by
- 907
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 89.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Estimating The Cost Of New Drug Development: Is It Really $802 Million? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1377/hlthaff.25.2.420
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- Adams, C. P., & Brantner, V. V. (2006). Estimating The Cost Of New Drug Development: Is It Really $802 Million? Health Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.25.2.420
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
