A company’s attitude towards risk fundamentally affects their product development strategy, which can vary between the development of a simple or prototype formulation or a fully market-ready, commercially viable product to be used in initial preclinical/clinical evaluation. Large pharma, with many potential drug candidates to prioritise, tends to be more risk-averse and so generally focuses on entering clinical evaluation with a market-ready formulation that has been developed with risk mitigation considered throughout the development process. Dr. Jon Lenn and Prof. Marc Brown at MedPharm explain why, for these large companies, an early failure is much less expensive than a failure in the clinic.