Pharmas Look to Rein in Drug Costs with Lab Automation

Think about the last medication you took. How much did it cost? How did it help you?

We all complain about the high prices of drugs in the U.S., but most of us don’t understand why those prices are so high. We blame greedy corporations, and sure, that’s an element for some of the sky-high drug prices out there (see: Shkreli, Martin). But there are also remarkably high costs in developing new drugs — including all the failed drugs that never make it to market — and those costs have to be recouped in sales or the companies giving us new medications would all go under.

I was at the annual meeting of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) earlier this week, where speakers cited a number of eye-opening statistics that are all too familiar to the drug discovery and development crowd. Here’s one: in recent decades, the cost of bringing a new drug to market has doubled every nine years. And another: 92% of drugs fail in clinical trials. Clinical trials are the most expensive part of developing a drug — they cost millions of dollars and every drug candidate has to go through several of them before being approved. As of 2024, each new drug coming out of pharmaceutical companies cost more than $2.2 billion to develop.

Here’s one way to think about it: the medications that required the least effort to discover and develop – well, those have already been discovered and developed by past generations of biopharma scientists. Some of these drug companies have been around for a century or more. The drugs that are being developed today, by contrast, are harder. Much harder. They require more science, more optimization, more expensive technologies. No wonder costs are soaring.

Pharma and biotech companies around the world are trying to find new ways to increase efficiency and decrease failures — all of which could help to lower costs. And one of the most important ways to accomplish this is through lab automation. These tools can come in the form of giant robotic arms that load instruments faster and more reliably than a human can, or smaller devices that make it possible to miniaturize experiments so they run faster and cost less while still delivering useful results. There’s an entire ecosystem of lab automation, from hardware to software, that companies are deploying to help lower the costs of drug development.

At the SLAS meeting, automation companies showed off their latest innovations. In addition to the robotic arms, autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, and scientific instruments, there was no shortage of technologies powered by AI. Now, regular Salisbury’s Take readers will know that I often take a dim view of AI, but the lab automation field is an area where I believe that AI tools truly can make a positive difference. Pharma teams are using AI to boost the efficiency of their automated operations; AI tools can pinpoint opportunities to run experiments faster, mine results to identify the most promising next steps, and predict new compounds to test as potential medications. Ideally, this will allow biopharma companies to scrub poor candidates earlier in the process, avoiding costly clinical trials for drugs that will never make it to market and focusing their resources instead on the drugs most likely to succeed.

Things move slowly in the biopharma world. We shouldn’t expect to see drug costs coming down in the near term, but with luck, the use of lab automation and AI will help prevent the next generation of medications from being even more costly than the current ones.