Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend [LWN.net]

Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend

Posted Nov 3, 2009 13:43 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Can you tell me how those words could do that? As a non-native speaker of
English I may just have used the wrong words.

Or maybe I shortened my argument too much. I meant, that those companies
have to do some R&D to make a usable product out of the results of the
basic research that happens at the universities. And what they often do is
just rebalancing the amount of active ingredients and sell the result as a
new product.

The point is: yes, they collectively spend some 100 Million USD on R&D
every year. But you have to compare that to the Billions they spend on
advertising alone.

Even if there were no patent protection anymore for their research
results, they would still have a timing advantage over their competitors
that may potentially copy their products. Competitors would still have to
analyze the drugs, find the ingredients, get it licensed so they be able
to sell it and get production going.
For sure that timing advantage would be worth the not even 12% of these
companies' budgets that they spend on R&D.

Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend

Posted Nov 3, 2009 16:30 UTC (Tue) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]

Your claim is grossly exaggerated. This publication:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107...

quotes a York University study. Their work shows pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on advertising as R&D. Frankly, I would expect that ratio to be reversed, as high-tech R&D costs are, well, high. (I have first-hand experience, having worked in similar R&D and piloting operations in years past.)

Your extravagant claim is "$100 million" for R&D and "billions" for advertising, which is a ratio of 1:20 or less. The NYU study says the ratio is not even as low as 1:2. This is why your statements lack credibility. They don't match up with published facts.

Courgette meets a dangerous (Red) Bend

Posted Nov 3, 2009 16:32 UTC (Tue) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]

Sorry, my error. For "NYU" above, substitute "York University."

Big Pharma

Posted Nov 3, 2009 16:31 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Do you have a source for those two figures you've quoted? Because the last I remember it was suggested that R&D spend is about the same as advertising, still a long way from "poor us, we spend every cent on R&D and now you want to take away our patents" but a lot more than pretty much any other industry.

The idea that all the real work is done "at the universities" may be superficially correct, but it involves a bit of sleight of hand. You've gone from counting how much is spent /by/ the companies to whether work is done /at/ the universities. In practice drug research _at_ universities is heavily funded by these same big pharmaceutical companies. If they decided to cut that spending, you'd see big job losses.

In fact this is a major topic of discussion. If the researchers were funded by government (= higher taxes to pay for it) they'd have no reason to do some of the dubious things they do today to ensure they keep their funding from big pharmaceutical companies. For example, deciding not to publish results from an experiment which shows no difference between an old drug and a new drug. Or changing the measured outcome of a controlled trial after the data is collected, in order to have a positive result rather than an equivocal one.

Big Pharma

Posted Nov 4, 2009 10:17 UTC (Wed) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of university research is funded by the government, especially basic research. The numbers might be different if you're talking about clinical trials on drugs.

I'm not sure about the specific abuses you're referring to; certainly universities have generally failed to establish sufficiently strict codes of conduct regarding grants and contracts with pharma. I believe that's changing, though.