Eroom's Law and the Pace of Biomedical R&D

In a world where technology advances exponentially, you might expect medical breakthroughs to keep pace. But paradoxically, the opposite has happened in drug development. A review of Eroom’s Law.

The inflation-adjusted cost to develop a new drug roughly doubles every nine years

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In a world where some technology advances exponentially, you might expect medical breakthroughs to keep pace. But paradoxically, the opposite has happened in drug development. A review of Eroom’s Law  (Moore’s Law spelled backwards) states that:

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The inflation-adjusted cost to develop a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.

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Coined in a 2012 Nature Reviews Drug Discovery paper, Eroom’s Law highlights a troubling trend, and despite more data, more funding, and more advanced tools, pharmaceutical R&D has become slower, more expensive, and less productive. The result is not merely inefficiency, but delayed treatments that arrive years later than they should, if they arrive at all.

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The Cost of Inefficiency

Eroom’s Law isn’t just statistics; it reflects deep structural inefficiencies within centralized research systems, which include but are not limited to:

• Bloated, risk-averse R&D pipelines
• Strict regulatory environments that raise the bar but slow the pace
• Redundant competition instead of coordinated innovation
• Opaque decision-making and funding loops closed to outsiders

Together, these forces create a system optimized for caution and capital preservation, rather than discovery and learning.

Moore’s Law, and the Inverse Reality of Biotech

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a prediction that would define the pace of innovation in computing. Moore’s Law states that:

The number of transistors on a microchip doubles roughly every two years, while the cost of computing is halved.

For decades, this forecast held. Technology got faster, cheaper, and more powerful at an exponential rate, and it also became the benchmark of progress.

But in the world of drug discovery, the opposite happened.

Why the Contradiction?

Biotech has access to more computing power, better data tools, and faster research methods than ever. But traditional drug development remains bloated, bureaucratic, and risk-averse

This contradiction reveals something deeper, which is: the problem isn’t a lack of tools. It’s the structure around how we use them.

When innovation is filtered through centralized institutions, narrow funding criteria, and closed decision-making, progress slows even as technical capacity increases.

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Decentralized Science Offers an Alternative

• Lowering entry barriers: Scientists don’t necessarily need extravagant grants with community support, awareness, and provable merit; allowing new ideas to gain traction.
• Funding what matters: Research can be guided by biological relevance and cross-species impact, rather than solely by short-term commercial viability. Longevity research that benefits both dogs and humans becomes possible, when participants and investors are aligned.
• Open science: Transparent data sharing, open protocols, and visibility into both successes and failures reduce redundancy and accelerate iteration across disciplines instead of hiding negative results behind closed doors.

Closing Note

Eroom’s Law paints a bleak picture of centralized drug development, and this has become a system failure. Fortunately, systems can be redesigned.

Dog Years DAO is part of that redesign, and a living experiment in how decentralized science can make research more equitable, efficient, and impactful.

If we can bring real treatments to our dogs, we may not just extend canine lives, we might also accelerate the future of longevity for everyone.

If this way of thinking about drug development and longevity resonates, Dog Years DAO is an open invitation to researchers, builders, caretakers, and anyone who believes science should move faster, together, and in service of life beyond a single species.