In the UK, it takes over 12 years to develop a new medicine to the standards of quality, efficacy and safety laid down by legislation. It typically costs £1.15 billion to do all the research and development necessary before a new medicine can be licensed for use. The majority of medicines under development never make it to the market; following thorough studies, they may be found to have unacceptable side effects, or they don’t work any better than existing treatments. Timeline of medicine development For every marketed medicine that makes enough money to pay for its development, about 25,000 chemical compounds were tested, on average 25 of these will have gone into clinical trials and five received approval for marketing. Our timeline of medicine development shows the stages a…