Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k alternative

Re:Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k a... by siscia on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:11AM (#16818887)

> Aside from that, more than half of pharma budgets are spent on spent on marketing and patent-workaround redevelopment than on actual productive drug research (even after accounting for new discoveries that sometimes come out of workaround research).

Do you have sources for this? It could really change my point of view on the issue but I need something more...

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Re:Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k a... by mft_ on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:38AM (#16819026)

I suspect the previous poster is referring to data like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

...which shows that big pharma generally (Roche excepted) spends more on marketing than R&D.

Of course, it's not actually half of all spend, as suggested, as this ignores other operating costs.

For example, to take Roche in 2017, sales and royalties brought in ~55.5m CHF. On the flip side, 14.4m CHF was spent on 'cost of sales' (= production costs, overheads, royalties, etc.), 9.5m CHF was spent on 'marketing and distribution', 10.3m CHF was spent on R&D, and 2.5m CHF on 'general and administration'.

So in the best case from the WP, R&D > Marketing & distribution, but R&D spend was roughly 28% of total spend.

https://www.roche.com/dam/jcr:b70415c0-954f-4a2a-a0e2-47f94b...

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