The cost of developing new molecular entities (NMEs) into approved therapies continues to increase with cost per launched NME ranging from $3 billion to more than $10 billion across major research based pharmaceutical companies [1]. Despite strong vetting for disease activity, only 5-10% of candidate NMEs in early stage clinical trials are eventually approved and this probability of approval has a direct relationship to total cost per approved drug [1, 2]. Thus, to maintain a sustainable drug development process, there is a critical need to increase the number of successful NMEs, while reducing the number of failures.
