Security quote of the week
Security quote of the week
Posted Sep 18, 2021 2:24 UTC (Sat) by mbg (subscriber, #4940)In reply to: Security quote of the week by Wol
Parent article: Security quote of the week
Indeed, working out how much it 'costs' for pharma to develop a new drug is not at all easy. Even working out the year-to-year R&D costs is difficult, due to complex corporate structures, R&D tax incentives, financing, etc. A lot of what is called 'R&D' on balance sheets you and I might call marketing (case in point: clinical trials that exist simply to introduce doctors to the drug, *after* it has been approved).
The bigger issue is the massive failure rate of drug development candidates. Costs of successful drugs need to be amortized against all the ones that didn't make it through the pipeline.
Needless to say, industry sources come up with much larger 'costs' than independent sources. A summary here: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/180/3/279.short
As to alternatives to massive big pharma profits, two people who have given it serious thought are Jamie Love from Knowledge Ecology International, who favours prize pools, and the economist Dean Baker.
In fact, Dean has written a lot recently on the costs of and profits from COVID-19 vaccine development: https://www.cepr.net/financing-drug-development-what-the-...