Question: Have you ever saved someone's life on the basis of one of your discoveries?

Elaine Duncan answered on 9 Jun 2020:

Hi Sasha, this is a great question! My motivation for working in the drug discovery industry is along these lines – I know what I do every day is working towards finding a cure or new medicine to help people suffering from diseases.

The drug discovery process is unfortunately very time consuming and expensive – it can take up to 15 years to discover a potential new drug and complete all the relevant testing to make sure it is safe and effective to treat the intended disease, and usually costs $1-3 billion to develop and win approval for a single new prescription medicine. I work right at the beginning of this process, meaning that the projects I’m working on are unlikely to get approval for at least another 10 years (and the drugs getting approved today were at this stage of development 10-15 years ago – when I was still in primary school!). Like I said the goal is always to improve people’s lives, so I really hope that in the future I can say yes!