Comment by bonsai_spool

I have seen these people, but we are speaking about drug companies making new drugs. I am not aware of an example of a new chemotherapeutic developed to reduce the side effects of a previous agent - that seems even less reasonable from an ROI perspective since we have good agents to control chemo-associated nausea. (edit) If a new agent happens to cause fewer side effects, that is welcome. But how would you justify the risk of the new agent not working at all?

The search for different formulations of an active agent seems a little unrelated (sibling comment to yours) but I concede that I didn't exclude that in my earlier argument.

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My point is that several posters here are giving arguments from first principles ('yes of course we would want to keep trying to make more medications because more options is better than fewer options') but not engaging with the enormous cost such a rationale would entail.