seedtick said:
Not to sound like I'm firmly entrenched on the side of big Pharma
but I have been involved in the development of new drugs and i know from first hand experience
1. most new drugs never make it to the marketplace, they fail for some reason and the reasons get more stringent every year. I'm convinced that aspirin would not get FDA approval if it was coming on the marketplace today
2. development, testing and final approval is very expensive and time consuming
3. companies have to make a profit or investors will put their money someplace else and the compnay will cease to exist
4. patent protection -usually 17 years - is all the pharma companies have to recoup their expenses for successful drugs and also the ones that went down the tubes
While it's easy to bash the big companies for making money and complain about the high cost of new drugs, remember that there's many folks alive today that would not be alive if drug research was stopped 10 or 20 years ago.
I don't know the ultimate solution to the problem, but taking away a compnay's incentive to develop new drugs isn't the answer
Seedtick - I've been in high capital, high tech as well. 15 years ago, a new jet engine was a billion dollar gamble. Today with computers, it's a lot less, but you still invest hundreds of millions knowing you won't make a profit for years after the regulators finally approve it. My brother worked at Intel, setting up new fabs - $3 billion a shot.
No one says the pharma companies can't make a profit. However, there is no reason we, the US citizens, should be funding the entire bill.
Another interesting tidbit:
A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim. The researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion.
