Stranded Technologies Podcast · Infinita City

Ep. 92: Jack Scannell On Eroom’s Law In Drug Development

·46 min·2 clips

Scannell argues that a 0.1 gain in model correlation can matter more than testing 10 or 100 times more compounds.

1. Stranded Technologies Podcast Ep. 92 focuses on Jack Scannell and Eroom’s Law in drug development. 2. Host Anthony Lee Zhang introduces Jack Scannell as a researcher on public choice, regulation, and drug R&D productivity, and Scannell brings medicine, neuroscience, consulting, and drug investment experience. 3. The episode asks why drug development costs keep rising even when technologies like genomics and machine learning keep getting cheaper. 4. Scannell says he moved from medicine to neuroscience, then into drug and biotech investment around 2005, which exposed the gap between hype and output. 5. He says the drug industry produced roughly 100 times more new drugs per inflation-adjusted dollar in 1950 than in 2010. 6. He distinguishes preclinical and clinical costs, saying the clinical share rose from about 40% in the 1960s to roughly two-to-one preclinical today. 7. He says the first explanation is the “better than the Beatles problem,” where generic competition and patented blockbuster aging make new drugs harder to sell. 8. He says the second explanation is a regulatory ratchet, where scandals and tragedies add requirements that are difficult to remove. 9. He says the third explanation is that drug companies spent many years in a period of strong market growth and pricing power, so they could throw money at R&D without enough discipline. 10. He says the fourth explanation is overconfidence in basic science, because mechanistic stories often sound convincing after approval but fail in humans. 11. Scannell says the better-than-the-Beatles problem is only partly regulatory, because crowded therapy areas also force larger trials and more complicated evidence generation. 12. He gives bowel cancer as an example, saying earlier treatment could follow a single simple path, while current protocols can stretch across hundreds of pages. 13. He says insurers now often require direct clinical-trial evidence for the precise use being prescribed, which can be harder to satisfy than the FDA. 14. He says the 1962 Kefauver-Harris amendments caused only a small, transient dip in the Eroom’s Law trend, and the line then returned. 15. He connects that regulation to thalidomide, also called Contergan in Germany, and says the drug caused severe limb deformities. 16. He says oncology and antibiotics show that regulation can still change, but the broader system keeps ratcheting upward over time. 17. Scannell’s style is analytical and comparative, with examples from Beatles records, bowel cancer, thalidomide, and sulfanilamide. 18. The conversation is interview-driven and technical, but it keeps returning to practical questions about incentives, reimbursement, and trial design. 19. People interested in drug development, health economics, and regulation will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting light banter or a short general-audience chat may skip it.

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