Attrition in drug discovery
Learning from failure
Attrition in drug discovery
2015
eLife

Publishing
Illustration
Magazine illustration

Learning from failure

The artwork displays a tablet that is formed from data that was produced from successful, as well as unsuccessful pharmaceutical development projects. This design aims to highlight the astonishingly problematic high rate of attrition that occurs in drug development. These failures are often labelled as useless, but they researchers and healthcare systems by generating evidence about disease theories and demonstrating the limits of proven drugs. Greater uptake of evidence from unsuccessful translational projects can improve the search for or the use of new interventions. Consequently biomedical research enterprise should take full advantage of all the information generated during the drug development process to turn failure into success.