{"id":226018,"date":"2025-11-27T00:39:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T06:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/where-are-all-the-trillion-dollar-biotechs"},"modified":"2025-11-27T00:39:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T06:39:25","slug":"where-are-all-the-trillion-dollar-biotechs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/where-are-all-the-trillion-dollar-biotechs","title":{"rendered":"Where are all the trillion dollar biotechs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/where-are-all-the-trillion-dollar-biotechs2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Of the many trends people chase in biotech, the only one that proves sure and consistent is declining returns. Even after adjusting for inflation, the number of new drugs approved per $1 billion of R&amp;D spending has halved approximately every nine years since 1950. Deloitte\u2019s forecast R&amp;D IRR for the top 20 pharmas fell below the industry\u2019s cost of capital (~7\u20138%) between 2019 and 2022. In other words, while the industry remained profitable overall, the incremental economics of R&amp;D investment were value-eroding rather than value-creating. So, while other industries have a reason to treat the current market downturn as transient, the business of developing medicine has a more fundamental problem to deal with \u2014 it is quite literally shrinking out of existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of the many trends people chase in biotech, the only one that proves sure and consistent is declining returns. Even after adjusting for inflation, the number of new drugs approved per $1 billion of R&amp;D spending has halved approximately every nine years since 1950. Deloitte\u2019s forecast R&amp;D IRR for the top 20 pharmas fell below [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,43,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-business","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}