text: Erooms law is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s. The inflation-adjusted cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. In order to highlight the contrast with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time, the name given to the observation is Moores law spelled backwards. The term was coined by Dr Jack Scannell and colleagues in 2012 in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.