How would you concretely measure the value of your work in the short and long term? During my lecture, I asked such a question from the students studying drug development at the University of Turku. The question was quite difficult. I received only one answer. Well, as anyone who teaches knows, even simple questions may get only one answer.
According to the brave respondent, the value of the work done in drug development could be measured by the number of patients treated with that drug in the future. It was easy to offer a countering question: Is the development of orphan drugs then not valuable in this sense? There is considerable uncertainty about the future number of patients in the initial stages of a drug development project.
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