Elsevier, Drug Discovery Today, 3(19), p. 209-214, 2014
DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2013.09.002
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In the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry sought to increase R&D productivity by shifting development tasks into parallel in order to reduce development cycle times and increase development speed. This paper presents a simple model demonstrating that when attrition rates are high, as in pharmaceutical development, such development speed initiatives can increase the expected time for the first successful molecule to complete development. Increasing the development speed of successful molecules may actually reduce R&D productivity - the Development Speed Paradox.