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Derek is speaking here about how the effort is vanishing in the public eye. But if you're someone doing research on a drug target, these sorts of failures are going to be visible to you when you do searches for previous attempts or approaches at the problem, at least if they advance as far as initial clinical trials.

I was thinking similar thoughts. I imagine a lot of efforts are duplicated in all industries. New players have to make many of the same mistakes established players made, and this is part of the barrier to entry.

Someone could potentially make a killing managing a marketplace for buying and selling failed industrial results. We learn from mistakes. If it were cheaper to learn from others’ mistakes than make them anew, this could have huge benefits for everyone. But it would have to be very enticing for the established players.

A drug failing doesn't mean a company can't do work improving it or building on top of it