stockbettor, I would think the huge rewards for the success of even a poorly performing cancer drug tends to make the biotech industry try anything that looks remotely like it will work.
If you lower the rewards, then biotech companies will be focused on only those projects they think have a high likely hood of success, and their ratio of wins to losses will improve and they will quit wasting so much of investors money.
“Despite advances in science and technology, we’re not very good at increasing the probability of success,” said Jim Green, senior vice president at Biogen Idec Inc. Typically only one out of every 10 drugs succeeds, and the winners have to pay for the losers, Green said. MBC chairman Bob Coughlin said that a short period of data exclusivity would also be a disincentive for companies to work on rare diseases that have small numbers of patients.
