This sort of pronouncement sounds more like a play by drug companies to get more subsidies and shoulder less of the basic science financial burden. Drug companies have pretty much picked all the low-hanging fruit for new drugs, which is the real reason there are so few new ones brought to market. Now the cost of developing a new drug is getting massively larger, while often only providing a marginally more effective solution compared to existing drugs.

But is the slowdown of new drugs really a crisis? Maybe the Big Pharma just needs to downsize, and put those scientists to work somewhere else.