The Cancer Drug Pipeline Has a Problem — Here’s Why

What I can also say is no matter what you think about individuals, in this administration or in different parts of the drug development ecosphere, all the different parts that interact with each other, that things have been very, very, very difficult in terms of raising funds to start new programs, Large pharma has been cutting back on its discovery arms.

There have been mass layoffs of essentially all of the early phase researchers and traditional venture capital and angel investors for early stage biotech and drug development have largely shriveled up and gone into safer areas like software and real estate and financial tech.

As a result, what we have is a very interesting situation, and you should be aware of it.

Right now, because the regulatory environment is very unstable within the US, honestly, no one really knows what it will take to get a drug approved by the current FDA.

The rules have changed.

In some ways, that may be good.

In some ways, that's pretty bad.

Overall, it leads to uncertainty.

And in the space of multi-million dollar drug trials, uncertainty is no one's friend.

What is happening as a result is that early research, drug discovery, drug design has shrunk.

Virtually all of the large pharmas have laid off big chunks of their early discovery and development staff.

They have put any hiring that they're doing into late-stage programs, things that are right on the cusp of finalizing clinical trials and being pushed out to the FDA for review.

So they're putting their resources into clinical trials, into regulatory affairs people, into marketing and sales people, into manufacturing people.

So the jobs are still there.

but they are late stage, not early stage.

What does this mean? This means that for the next year or so, maybe two, if we're really lucky, maybe three, I don't think so, I think one to two years, we are likely to see probably more drugs come out because all of these companies are uncertain about what the future looks like and they're trying to capitalize on the programs that they've already invested the most in.

Early phase drug development and discovery the foundational work to make new drugs has almost completely dried up.

That sector of the biotech market shriveled up almost completely more than a year ago at this point.

I'm talking to you in January of 2026.

It has shown really very little sign of rebounding.

I don't think it will during the current administration and during the current instability about regulations.

No one wants to invest in something when they don't have any clue what the path forward will be.

So for the next year or two, possibly three, we will continue to see good new drugs come out.

Beyond that, three years, four years, five years out, out to eight, possibly as far as 10, these things drag on for quite a while.

We will likely have many, many fewer drug ideas going into development.