Andreessen Horowitz February 14, 2023
Eroom’s Law (the backwards Moore) is the often cited, and arguably inaccurate, observation that drug discovery gets slower and more expensive over time. It’s certainly a slog, but R&D efforts have yielded 378 new FDA-approved drugs between 2010 and 2019, almost double the previous decade. As a metric, even FDA approvals underemphasize the astounding advances that come from biotech innovation–like printing a COVID vaccine in 48 hours that has reached billions.
When the term “biotech” entered the mainstream in the 1970s, the then-referenced “tech” was recombinant DNA, a technique to splice genes from one organism to another. Cohen and Boyer used this approach at their fledgling startup Genentech to coax bacteria to pump out human insulin; it helped birth an...
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