Aside from the military[1], in what other categories of product do those waving that banner support mandatory payments to private entities supporting their preferred agenda[2]?
Never mind that the military is the best comparison to drugs in terms of regulation - the only products less "free-market" in the US than drugs are military weapons. In a way, there's a funny symmetry there.
[1] A huge amount of that money goes directly to private firms, just like pharma payments.
[2] Well, I guess one can opt out of medical care.
Pfizer opened their Sandwich site in 1954 and when they closed it in 2011 it wasn't because of the NHS.
Of the 252 drugs approved from '97 to '05... 58% from pharmaceutical companies, 18% from biotech companies, 16% from universities, transferred to biotech 8% from universities, transferred to pharma
Second of all, discovering a drug gets you about 1/4 of the way to an approved, marketed drug. Typically the breakdown between research and development costs are 1/3 and 2/3. No academic institutions do the development part, where most of the cost is.
[1]http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/11/04/whe...
I want to know how the R&D looks for compound group discovery. Everything else is just repackaging with a chemistry kit.
118 of the drugs during this period were considered to have scientific novelty (46%), and of those: 44% were from pharmaceutical companies. 25% were from biotech companies, and 31% were from universities (transferred to either biotech or pharma)
Of the 118 scientifically novel drugs (new MOA, etc), 69% were NOT from academia. That is, academia has zero to do with the discovery all the way up to the approval of the drug.
Please don't insult our intelligence.The context for this discussion is about greedy companies using existing research for free and contributing nothing back. The linked article doesn't show which scientific research contributed to the product development. Universities are not all primarily engaged in drug discovery.
Now, if you'd like to claim that that discovery was based on science paid for by the gov't, I won't disagree, but continuing that line of thought we could claim that drug companies are greedy because they are taking advantage of organic chemists who did work 200 years ago.
>No academic institutions do the development part, where most of the cost is.
Because they got for free all of the decades of scientific research.
Yes, the scientific research that cost maybe 1% of the total cost of bringing the drug to market. Makes sense that the company should share some of the wealth.
I definitely disagree here. There has been plenty of basic science discovered at private companies. I do agree they are hesitant to share it, but that's doesn't mean it doesn't happen. A great example of the Upjohn dihydroxylation reaction. Discovered at Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, freely disseminated through journal publications and now a key technology in organic synthesis.