A TED talk last week by geneticist and physician Francis Collins shed some light on a massive gulf that exists in the pharmaceutical world – that between the fundamental knowledge and the application of this knowledge. We currently know the molecular cause for 4000 diseases yet only have treatments for 250 of them. The main difficulty encountered on the path from discovery to the patient’s bedside is that of the lengthy ‘pipeline’ process which all drugs must follow if they are to gain approval.