In 2022, I took on a project to help a group of scientists bring a new, shelf-stable vaccine to the market. We ran straight into a thicket of issues that at the time seemed almost impossible to believe, but which I've since learned are utterly typical.

The clinical trials process is broken. It is unbelievably expensive and slow: it takes more than ten years and a billion dollars to get a typical drug to an approval. The world gets only a quarter as many new drugs per R&D dollar as we did in 1980. "Our plan as a society," wrote STAT's Matthew Herper, "seems to be to manufacture more and more sports cars and to drive them faster and faster into the mud."

Development & Research is a new video interview series about doing things differently. And things can be done differently—drug development costs can range over two orders of magnitude. The same drug can wash out of one trial while passing another with flying colors at the exact same time. Outsiders can far outpace experts at executing effective trials quickly. To dig into the why and how, we talk with leaders from industry, VC, government, and academia. Through our conversations, I hope that we can shed light on what's been going wrong in the world of clinical trials, and what can be done better—if we're willing to do things differently.

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Team

Development & Research is hosted by Ross Rheingans-Yoo and produced by Sam Cottrell Media. Further production credits will be posted by the Season-1 wrap.

You can contact the production team at hello@developmentandresearch.bio.