How has the drug development industry failed the consumer?

The drug market operates under the fundamental principles of supply, demand, pricing, and distribution. As expected, treating drugs as commodities prioritizes profit over public health. This economic framework creates and deepens systemic inequalities. Newer and more effective drugs are becoming unaffordable. Approximately 90% of drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail to reach the market due to lack of clinical efficacy and unmanageable toxicity. This high failure rate makes developing a single medication take up to 15 years and cost over $1 billion. This high developmental cost translates into very expensive drugs, for the few that can afford them.

This poorly designed system forces the drug developer to charge the maximal amount for their finished drug product. For them, this is a reasonable "return on investment" for the cost of development. This system has now been clearly shown to not work. Modern pharmaceutical pipelines have moved away from large scale, blockbuster clinical trials and now focus on oncology, gene therapy, and rare orphan diseases, which feature small, defined patient subsets rather than massive broad populations. An incurable disease that can be treated with a specially designed drug will allow for a very high price tag, to treat the "live or die" disease. This is a disastrous direction for modern medicine to take.