Opportunities for Data Science in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Use of Data to Find Efficiencies in Drug Development Can?t Come Too Soon

By the numbers, 2016 was not a good year for the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. As of early December, only 19 new drugs had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), fewer than half of those approved in 2015 and the lowest number since 2007. Further, the FDA approved only 61% of submissions in 2016, compared to 95% in 2015 [1]. And, among the largest companies, the return on investment for research and development (R&D) fell to 3.7% [2].