Comment by a_bonobo

I actually do this for a living within pharma now! There's a TON of work that goes into drug discovery before we even call it a program. The odds of success are low, so we put in months of work evaluating a candidate before even have a hunch of a program.

Yes, the science advances, previously high-hanging fruits become low-hanging become high-hanging again [1], but the tooling also advances: we now have databases like OpenTargets which let us more easily evaluate potential drug targets. Failure is so much more than that, though: a program can fail after you've shown efficacy in animals, sometimes it just doesn't happen in the human subjects. Or you fail to find the right measurement (endpoint). A million ways to die.

[1] Gene editing is an example: impossible, then very possible, but now the blocker is public perception which in turn blocks investment.