For an individual VC firm that may be the case, but perhaps not for the whole drug discovery sector?

nature of the beast, high risk early on, cheap, price goes up as derisking occurs. for startups and drugs. risk is priced in. to everything

The question I was addressing was whether the NIBR was more or less economically efficient than a more free-wheeling culture of start-ups failing or succeeding, with the successes transitioning either to "Big Pharma", or becoming bigger themselves.

The author of the article implies that the NIBR approach was more productive, but didn't compare it to an alternative that consumed similar amounts of capital.