Eroom’s Law is Moore’s Law spelled backwards. It’s a term that was coined in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article by researchers at Sanford Bernstein and describes the exponential decrease in biopharma research and development efficiency between the 1950s and 2010. Whereas Moore’s describes technologies becoming exponentially faster and cheaper over time, Eroom’s Law describes the trend of drug development becoming exponentially more expensive over time. The article describing Eroom’s Law was published in 2012, and analyzed data up till 2010. That is perhaps ironic as 2010 appears to be an inflection point in the trend. In Breaking Eroom’s Law, the authors analyze the data since 2010 and show that costs appear to have stabilized over the last ten years. But what has contributed to this critical and exciting trend shift? In our conversation, Jorge and Vijay discuss the three causes cited by the authors of the Breaking Eroom’s Law article, their views on what technologies and policies will continue to push costs down, and their opinion on whether Eroom’s Law is broken for good.

In this episode of the a16z bio journal club, we cover one of the key clinical trials that supported the recent FDA approval of the first prescription video game. The game was developed by Akili Interactive, is called EndeavorRx, and is now a clinically-validated therapy for improving attention in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  But how does a game improve attention? How does a clinical trial evaluate the efficacy of a game? And what are the pros and cons of a video game as compared to traditional pharmacological therapies for ADHD? Bio deal team partner Justin Larkin and Lauren Richardson delve into these questions and more in their discussion of this clinical trial: “A novel digital intervention for actively reducing severity of paediatric ADHD (STARS-ADHD): a randomised controlled trial” in Lancet Digital Health (April 2020) by Scott H Kollins, Denton J DeLoss, Elena Cañadas, Jacqueline Lutz, Robert L Findling, Richard S E Keefe, Jeffery N Epstein, Andrew J Cutler, and Stephen V Faraone. a16z bio Journal Club (part of the a16z Podcast), curates and covers recent advances from the scientific literature -- what papers we’re reading, and why they matter from our perspective at the intersection of biology & technology (for bio journal club). You can find all these episodes at a16z.com/journalclub.