I'm giving some talks over the summer, and am getting bored with some of the stuff I have, so I'm thinking of some new stuff to put in to add a bit of variety and interest. I'm getting interested in thinking about assay level attrition, and trying to put more of a taxonomy and inter-relationship mapping between assays used in drug discovery. As part of this, there is a cost component for each type of assay, going from very cheap to really really expensive. Here's a little picture from the presentation I've put together - I used educated guesses for the costs, so please, please critique them !
So, what do people think of the guesstimates of costs per compound per assay point on the picture above. I know it is really variable, there are startup costs to set something up, etc, etc. But what do you think about the orders of magnitude, are they about right? One of the key features of the numbers I've put there, are that there are big transitions at the switch between in silico and in vitro, and then on entering clinical trials.
The picture at the top of this post (about unicorns) is from the very funny http://www.depressedcopywriter.com/.
Comments
One could easily envision 'selling' in-silico results based on obsolete software-models (I've seen such papers), yet performing an kinase assay past its expiration date is often unthinkable.
The cost of clinical trials are incredibly varied depending on the type of drug and drug target in question, whereas those of in-silico are typically not.
In-silico models are of course primarily optmized to computing only what is needed, and constrained by the underlying model, whereas empirical data generation is limited by other constraints, and often much more data is generated than ever published (especially when we are talking about corporate science)
The costs of development are not factored in to my numbers either, since it is difficult to know when to stop..... A scientist writes the software, and they have a salary that pays them during this time, but do you count the cost of their education, etc.
It's a difficult problem!
I am interesting in the source of this prices. Does any reference exist supporting them?
Thank's!
The costs are just my personal estimates for this. So they are just that estimates. There could be some better ways of getting estimates - for example going to a CRO and asking for quotes for a series of defined and typical assays. The issue there is that there are many factors that would complicate things - they would have a profit margin to include, and also want to recoup cost of capital, etc. Secondly, they would not be interested in running a single biochemical assay for a few dollars, and then there would be a 'volume discount' to handle.
Another interesting number, alongside timeline as suggest by Bin, would be number of assays run per year, my guess it would be many billions for the virtual screening end of the spectrum through to maybe a few thousand at the clinical trials end.