A drug pipeline is the set of drug candidates that an individual

pharmaceutical company The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate sympto ...

or the entire

pharmaceutical industry The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...

collectively has under

discovery Discovery may refer to: * Discovery (observation), observing or finding something unknown * Discovery (fiction), a character's learning something unknown * Discovery (law), a process in courts of law relating to evidence Discovery, The Discovery ...

development Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development hell, when a project is stuck in development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting *Development (music), the process thematic material is reshaped * Photograph ...

at any given point in time. The drug pipeline is also sometimes restricted to a particular

drug class A drug class is a set of medications and other compounds that have a similar chemical structures, the same mechanism of action (i.e. binding to the same biological target), a related mode of action, and/or are used to treat the same disease. In ...

or extended to mean the process of discovering drugs (the research and development pipeline). The R&D pipeline involves various phases that can broadly be grouped in 4 stages: discovery, pre-clinical,

clinical trials Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel vaccines, drugs, dietar ...

and marketing (or post-approval).

Pharmaceutical companies The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...

usually have a number of compounds in their pipelines at any given time. The drug pipeline is an important indicator of the value and future prospects of a

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of people, whether Natural person, natural, Legal person, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common p ...

. Usually the more compounds in the pipeline, and the more advanced stage that these are in the better. Other factors that are taken into account when assessing the value of a pipeline include the size of the target market of each

drug A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via insuffla ...

, the

market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...

that the drug is expected to capture and the risk that it will not be approved. The cost of developing a new drug is astronomical – typically a drug costs many hundreds of millions and can reach 1 billion dollars over 15–17 years. Assessing this risk and filtering out, as early as possible, compounds that may not eventually get approved is essential to the pharmaceutical industry and involves checking the effectiveness of drugs as well as the likelihood of toxic events ( Adverse event prediction).

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Drug Pipeline Food and Drug Administration