R&D Costs and Returns by Therapeutic Category

This study examines the degree to which therapeutic class accounts for variability in drug development costs. It also scrutinizes how sales levels vary across the associated therapeutic classes for those drugs that have reached the marketplace. A stratified random sample of 68 investigational drugs that first entered clinical testing anywhere in the world from 1983 to 1994 was selected from the pipelines of 10 pharmaceutical firms. Clinical...