Eroom's law

Moore's law spelled backwards, coined in a 2012 paper.^[1]

Eroom's law

1. (pharmacology) The observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
   • 2014, Jeremy A. Greene, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine, JHU Press, →ISBN, page 271:

     Eroom's Law, in turn, observes that in the pharmaceutical sector the decline in innovation is itself constant: the yield of FDA-approved drugs per billion dollars spent has halved every nine years between 1950 and 2010.

   • 2018, Mark Stevenson, We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World‎^[1], Abrams, →ISBN:

     With a touch of wry humour, the authors dubbed this phenomenon Eroom's law, the reverse spelling of Moore's Law – the famous law of computing that expresses the doubling of processing power per dollar every two years […]

   • 2025 December 10, Ruxandra Teslo, “A manifesto for reviving biopharma productivity. When it comes to Eroom's Law, some of the most important problems are the boring ones”, in Ruxandra's Substack‎^[2]:

     I first encountered Eroom's Law, the observation that biopharma productivity, measured as new drugs approved per billion dollars of R&D spending, has been steadily declining since the 1960s, halfway through my PhD. The fact that I completed a supposedly world-class undergraduate biology degree without ever hearing about this concept, and then spent another two years in a PhD program before discovering it, now feels damning. If anything deserves a place in Biology 101, it's the recognition that our ability to turn biological insight into effective medicines has been deteriorating for decades. Over time, I became somewhat obsessed with this problem. I also discovered that most biologists aren't. That lack of engagement, I think, fuels a kind of magical thinking: the belief that simply doing “more and better science” will reverse the productivity decline. But we have had more and “better” science for decades. Clearly, we need to start thinking about this differently. […] Earlier this year, I learned that Jack Scannell, who coined Eroom's Law, is similarly frustrated with the endless list of fashionable “solutions” that hand-wave past these fundamental problems. Since he has written at length about how to think about predictive validity, we ended up focusing on the importance of improving clinical trials […]

• Eroom's law on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• Moore's Law, Moore's law