Is pharma putting more money into early R&D?

This morning at the 2006 linkurl:BIO meeting;://www.bio.org/events/2006/ in Chicago, I listened to a panel of high profile executives at a range of companies within the biotech/pharma sector, all of whom seemed to agree that pharmaceutical companies are taking more risks in recent years by investing in earlier-stage products. This is a major shift for the industry, which has traditionally chosen to spend more money on later-stage products with more data to suggest they work, rather than throw th