Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

Why would you help your competitors speed up? 🤔

22 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Drug development costs $2 billion per drug with a 90% failure rate after first patient testing. Companies now use AI to run virtual experiments, cutting costs and timelines to get candidates into clinical trials faster and improve Phase 1 success rates.

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It costs around $2 billion to bring a single drug to the market. On top of that, scientists spend around 5 years or so to iterate ever so slightly over individual drug ideas before even dosing the first patient. And once you dose the first patient, 90% of these drug ideas ultimately fail. Over the last decade, many companies have used AI to basically run experiments on the computer instead of running them in the lab, which is obviously cheaper. The more you optimize these drugs before putting them in the first patient, the more So you're helping pharma get FDA approval faster.
That's your sort of goal?
It's primarily about getting to the clinical trials faster and having higher success rate in phase 1.
A big idea of yours is to share data by helping your competitors speed up their process. Isn't that kind of hurting you?