How a medicine is created
Research and Development (R&D) encompasses every phase, starting with understanding a disease and its biological foundations up to and including marketing a new medication.
Developing a drug involves a process which is:
- Long: on average 15 years
- Complex: high level scientific and technological activities involving multidisciplinary teams (researchers, physicians, chemists, pharmacists, engineers…)
- Costly: Pharmaceutical companies devote 10 to 20% of their annual sales figures to research and development. In 2004, the sanofi-aventis R&D budget amounted to almost 4 billion euros.
The process of a medicine creation can be divided in 4 successive steps:
