Drug pipeline
A drug pipeline is the set of drug candidates that a pharmaceutical company—or the industry as a whole—is actively researching and developing. It can refer to all drug discovery or a specific group of drugs.
The development process generally has four broad stages: discovery, pre-clinical testing, clinical trials, and marketing after approval.
Companies usually have many compounds in their pipelines at once. A bigger, more advanced pipeline often signals better future prospects. Other important factors include how large the drug’s potential market is, how much market share it might capture, and the risk that it won’t be approved.
Biotech firms near clinical trials are often bought by larger drug companies for high prices. But these deals can fail if near-term products don’t materialize, which can mean losing the acquired company’s knowledge and expertise.
Developing a new drug is extremely costly, often hundreds of millions of dollars and up to about a billion, over 15–17 years. To manage risk, companies try to weed out unlikely candidates early by testing effectiveness and predicting potential adverse effects.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:22 (CET).