The phrase "a difficult pathway to" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a challenging route or process leading to a particular goal or outcome.
Example: "Achieving success in this industry can be a difficult pathway to navigate, filled with obstacles and setbacks."
Alternatives: "a challenging road to" or "a tough journey to".
"There is the pathway to Test cricket now for us in three or four years and while it is a very difficult pathway, it is there for us now," says Joyce. "But the situation at the moment is that we don't get a huge amount of opportunities to play games against the top teams, so our only real stages are the 50-over World Cup and the World Twenty20.
Furthermore, the multiple intrinsic feedback pathways, the cross-organ communication, and the interplay between autophagy and carcinogenesis make it difficult to target a single pathway to treat metabolic diseases without triggering unwanted side effects.
In addition, challenges exist in developing pharmacological tools to specifically inhibit Wnt ligand activity that have made this pathway difficult to dissect.
Above all, the success of the programme rests on providing hugely fulfilling experiences, providing a spring board to permanent positions, and offering young people a strong career pathway, even in a difficult economic climate.
The slow-growth phenotype of the triple mutant strain made it difficult to distinguish pathway specific effects from general sickness in this strain.
Pathway completeness is a difficult estimate, and therefore, should be used with caution especially when whole genomes are mapped.
In our work, it is difficult to identify pathway-ADR associations using the small number of ADRs observed for each drug.
However, it has proved difficult to infer pathways from microarray data by deriving modules of multiple related genes, rather than individual genes.
Fire is one of the largest potential risks to loss of stored terrestrial C and is a loss pathway that is difficult to quantify due to the high degree of spatial and temporal variation in fire emissions.
