R&D technology investments: misguided and expensive or a better way to discover medicines?

The pharmaceutical industry is in crisis owing to spiralling costs and a lack of new product launches. It is said that expensive investments in technology have not paid off. But is this really true? In this review, we explore some of the recent medicines that were, or are being, brought to market, and we discuss how they were discovered and what difference new technologies have made during the discovery of these medicines.