I wonder how the results would change if they had considered countries like Brazil, which offers a cocktail of ~17 drugs for free for everyone HIV positive since 1996 (when patents were fought in the supreme court IIRC). Many americans and europeans (also japanese) come here every year to get some of these medicines for a fraction of what they would cost back home.
I'm not a big fan of drug company profits (and the patents that provide them), but to be fair, I wonder how the results would change without American- and European-developed drugs.
This would be more plausible if the companies in question spent more on R&D than marketing. Also, there are plenty of other ways to fund drug research besides the exorbitant system we use today.
It's a typical engineering fallacy that if you build it they will come.
The public, including doctors, have so much information to consume that if they aren't re-educated on treatment choices the drug will die and so too may the company.
Advertising is absolutely critical in recouping R&D costs. And that's assuming the drug makes it to market (which a majority do not).
>In the United States, it takes an average of 12 years for
>an experimental drug to travel from the laboratory to your
>medicine cabinet. That is, if it makes it. Only 5 in 5,000
>drugs that enter preclinical testing progress to human
>testing. One of these 5 drugs that are tested in people is
No, doctors do not have "too much information to consume" especially in relation to new drugs on the market.
In the highly specialized field of medicine, you do not need to know about every drug that comes out every year. You only need to know about the handful of drugs that are important to your specialty. Further physicians should be reading medical literature regarding the efficacy of these new drugs and should not be getting their education from a pharmacy rep with a bachelors in communication.
This idea that we wouldn't have any new drugs if American's didn't pay exorbitant fees for pharamaceuticals is completely false. It's a rationalization that we Americans have come up with to feel better about being taken to the cleaners by pharma companies.
I had the displeasure of working for a company that was bought out by a multi-national pharma. The crap they pulled disgusted me to the point that I quit without another job lined up. If you think contributing to a company that improves click rates is pointless, try contributing to a company that uses its leverage to eviscerate its customers on their deathbeds. It's infuriarating.
The funny part is: this "education" often happens on turist attractive locations like remote islands where doctors can come with their families... and pharma companies pay the costs... sad reality...
That's incorrect and based on an analysis that lumps all sales and general expenses into "marketing".
Also, companies don't market unless it brings in more revenue than it costs (positive ROI). Thus, marketing pays for itself. They wouldn't do it otherwise.
> CSDD’s finding, a bellwether figure in the drug industry, is based on an average out-of-pocket cost of $1.4 billion and an estimate of $1.2 billion in returns that investors forego on that money during the 10-plus years a drug candidate spends in development.
the estimate includes money that investors could have made if they invested elsewhere?
Opportunity costs are real. Promising hypotheses are abundant and cheap. Exploring each with grueling, resource-intense, high-standard science is expensive.
Society would collectively decide to fund drug development because it betters all of humanity. There are ways to innovate without fucking over everyone for the sake of profit, you know.
Then you have to solve a very difficult resource allocation problem. Capitalism solved it with a distributed scalable universal reward mechanism (profit). At least in European societies drug discovery is then still financed by society because there exists universal healthcare, which is subsidized by the state for underprivileged people.
Profitability funds the next generation of drugs. It pays the salaries of researchers and clinicians and funds human trials.
E.g. A drug like Kadcyla that gives six months to late stage breast cancer patients. 20 years ago that option wasn't available but now it is an option, in part, due to profits of other drugs.
