Our maintained hypothesis is that drug development responds to the intensity of consumer demand. We look at the distribution of drug development by disease and link this to the economic harm caused by disease as measured by mortality. Mortality data represent the net effect of human frailty and...

This work extends prior research that finds drug development is driven by demand factors such as mortality rates of the diseases new drugs are aimed at. Here we find that the number of drugs in the development pipeline is strongly positively related to the price of existing drugs treating those...