"Most experimental drugs fail before they make it through all the tests required to figure out if they actually work and if they're safe. But some drugs get fairly far down that road, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, based on poorly conducted studies at the outset."

"Medical researchers reviewing this sorry state of affairs say the drug-development process needs serious improvement."

"Consider drugs that are being developed to treat ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. In the past decade or so, nine potential drugs have been tested in people who have this degenerative nerve disorder. Not one has been effective."