So you spend billions($2.5 billion being average) inventing a new drug and anyone should be allowed to copy and sell it? That would foster innovation and not kill pharmaceutical market?
This is a very unhelpful pseudo question, that adds nothing to the conversation but can easily derail it. Do you have at least a source for that "claim"?
But I remember seeing statements here and there that at least half the "cost" of a new drug is marketing. Commercials, paying for 'conferences' for doctors etc.
Not going to search for citations, I'm sure you have something ready to prove me wrong and show how 95% of the cost is blood, sweat and tears.
The marketing is critical because they have a limited window of time within which to recoup most of the development costs. If adoption ramps up too slowly, the company will not make enough money to offset the investment. Marketing improves time to revenue for a product where exclusivity will be short-lived. If they didn't spend on marketing, the R&D wouldn't exist, so it is kind of weird to act like this is a waste of money.
It is like saying solar panels are bad for the climate because manufacturing them requires CO2 production.
It shouldn't need to be said that no one would do marketing if it didn't more than pay for itself and offset the costs of the thing being marketed.
You are literally going to use “build it and they will come” as an argument on this site? The empirical evidence that you are wrong is overwhelming, it takes an enormous amount of effort to connect customers with a product no matter how perfectly suited the product is to meet their needs. Startups spend more time on this question than almost any other.
> Research doesn't cost $2.5 billion, lobbying does.
It... actually does. The utter majority of pharmaceutical cost are the clinical trials, and the cost of "failed" compounds has to be absorbed by the few that eventually pass.
It used to be the case that the development part would be done by universities and government grants, but universities these days prefer to hoard their inheritances instead of spending it, and governments lack the ideas and auditing capability, so everything has gotten privatized and with it, control transferred from democratically elected institutions to quarterly-focused boards accountable only to shareholders not society.
I'll wire you 2.6billion (the extra 0.1 for your trouble) in exchange for a cure for alzheimers deliverable 5 years from now against 5 billion if you can't deliver. Should be an easy 100million+ for you.
That's pretty much precisely what happened in the COVID-19 vaccine race.
Though to be fair, basic research into mRNA vaccines dates to 1989, clinical trials to 2001, though quite obviously not for COVID-19 vaccines themselves.
The Covid vaccines were actually formulated within days of widespread public awareness of the disease. What took months were clinical trials (begun April 2020, Phase III by November of the same year), and emergency use authorisation by December 2020, and ramping up production and distribution, the first less than 12 months after the WHO had first announced the disease, the second (widespread availability) within 18 months.
Different conditions and treatments are of course widely divergent. Vaccines against viruses are reasonably well understood and simple in principle (trigger an immune-system response without triggering the disease), though even here some viruses can prove difficult to vaccinate against (rhinoviruses, forms of viral hepatitis, HIV). Pharmaceutical treatments against cardivascular, neurological, oncological, psychological, and other conditions are quite different. And in the case of infectious bacterial pathogens, I've been hearing and reading about the lack of effective novel antibiotic agents for nearly 50 years. In the case of some ancient scourges (totally drug-resistant tuberculosis is at or near the top of my list) this is truly terrifying.
The other challenge is that what the pharmaceutical industry focuses on --- chronic conditions facing wealthy populations with high-payout insurance --- often fails to match the true personal and public health concerns of humans at large. Much of the pharmaceutical industry's concentration is on relabeling or recertifying existing drugs, either to a new condition or with mildly tweaked formulations or delivery which serve to extend patent protection. Neither greatly advances the pharmaceutical formulary, and many at-risk populations go unserved.
