You have to get pretty lucky to invent something and get it though all trials and approval, but then you only get to earn money on it for a short period before it goes generic. There is literally no way to build a durable competitive moat in biotech. You just have to keep getting lucky. Eli Lilly has had a streak of luck lately, Pfizer and Biogen have been swinging and missing a lot.

My guess is that there will be some kind of huge explosion (possibly the next bubble) in biotech within the next few years when DNA sequencing using nanopore [1] hits a price point that makes DNA sequencing something you just do with thinking about the cost. Today it is too expensive, so you have to think about this huge expense in your lab / research budget. Soon, the cost of DNA comes down so it becomes more of a commodity and a tool that researchers can just use at will. Later, there will be an explosion of usage as the tech becomes a common household item. We will see that nanopore will be integrated in all kinds of sensors, your smart watch, fitness tracker, and kitchens (to check your food quality). Some even say that it will replace the microscope.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanopore_sequencing

bio is hard

bio is still in the investigative stage in many ways, and much of what we do is treating symptoms rather than the often unknown causes of disease

there are so many processeses that are useing wildly complex chemicals (protiens, enzymes, etc) in miniscule quantites, that are used up in there incredibly brief existances, and we can only infer them from the simple fact that something happened and things changed.

Now there is a backtracking on "junk dna", ooopsy baby. the good part is that with each thing we learn we are that little bit closer to bieng able to engineer the bio chemisry we need to achive a given goal the bad part is that it might take 100 trillion to make back the first one,as there will be no partial solution or who knows, the roseta stone for DNA/RNA could be waiting just around the corner

Legislators have made the business almost impossible. The regulatory barriers to creating a new drug are immense and the IP laws give very little protection.

Further, many countries will simply ignore IP laws if a drug is successful.

We need to figure this out so that investment will be made.

So probably, saturation has been reached just simply? You can't pour money endlessly into the same thing hoping it will keep bringing returns infinitely. Eventually the opportunity is just exhausted. I wonder why is it a surprise to anyone.