“I have this degree in Chemistry, and now they want me to be an accountant?”

Scientists have double the burden while working to move their compound forward, then having to stop and account for the costs. What are the economic rules for keeping a candidate-seeking program supplied? There are several options for keeping an escalating early drug development program supplied with compounds under study. Compounds can be made in-house if the chemistry resources are available; they can be made outside under your discretion if not. You can synthesize asymmetrically or resolve a racemate.  These options and trade-offs have calculable costs. This presentation focuses on using simple back-of-hand calculations to understand the return on investment (ROI) for chromatographic chiral separation.