Software for managing the risks and improving the profitability of pharmaceutical research

This paper presents software, and the stochastic model on which it is based, the purpose of which is to help decision makers to allocate resources during preclinical pharmaceutical research so as to improve risk management and profitability. Our model takes account of the successive stages of the research process, the possible non-linearity of the relationship between effort allocation and progress, discounting due to obsolescence, and competition between successive candidate drugs in a project, and its dependence on whether these are from the same or from different series of similar compounds. We shall show that it produces reasonable results, leading in some cases to a potentially dramatic improvement in profitability.