I'm fine with that. Funding drugs based on profit potential is hugely distorting. E.g., Oxycontin. Or the whole pharmaceutical sales and promotion apparatus. Or the way it's much easier to fund something that mitigates a problem instead of curing it.

We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-sh...

[2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-...

[3] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

For pharma specifically, trade secrets could be a decent alternative. Coke comes to mind as a success story in that regard - if it was protected by a patent, we’d be awash in cokes made by someone other than Coca-Cola company because patents expire. Instead, it’s a trade secret that can be kept indefinitely.

You of course get a lot of imitation cokes and that’s great! More consumer choice. With Pharma, the idea is that you get generics after the patent expires. However, an interesting “what if” to ponder - what if the resources that go into generics went instead into the coke-wannabes of the pharma and actually resulted in more innovation? We’ll never know.

Medicine development should be sponsored by the government anyway. Private sector development funding optimises for drawn-out therapies that manage a condition indefinitely rather than ones that cure it. This is an unconscionable status quo.

Public funding is fine for when your end-goal is known. In medicine, the end-goal is known: cure/manage condition X, which will save lives or improving quality of life of sufferers.

Optimising for patentable, innovative techniques is no longer a distraction (because those aren't needed to "protect your investment"). Optimising for ongoing therapy rather than a one-off/infrequent cure is no longer a distraction because you already got your money from the government and ain't getting any more. You can just focus on getting the job done quickly, with the cheapest techniques available (though boring they might be), and with the cheapest possible total cost of running the therapy start-to-end.

> Private sector development funding optimises for drawn-out therapies that manage a condition indefinitely rather than ones that cure it.

And still, Moderna and BioNTech came up with vaccines for COVID-19, not therapies.

That's a great development which I welcome whole-heartedly, but I don't think this diminishes my broader argument. There are still many conditions besides COVID-19 that only have a therapy available but no cure because of business reasons.

> There are still many conditions besides COVID-19 that only have a therapy available but no cure because of business reasons.

Name three, and give reasons to believe that there's no cure for business reasons. If you can't name at least three (of the "many conditions"), then how can you be so sure of this?

#1) Psychedelics/psilocybin for mental health. Cost basically $0 to produce but the US Mental Health industry was a $225B industry in 2019. Now though big pharma sees the writing on the wall, so is inventing patented variations (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9445723...) because otherwise these natural substances that people have been taking for thousands of years wouldn't be "safe".

#2) Oxycontin. We have far better cures for short-term pain management. A 1996 internal email from Sackler: "get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is [sic] the way to go.15" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5234149/)

#3) Unnecessary procedures (440k/deaths year from medical errors -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5234149/)

1) Psilocybin research was, and it probably still is in most of the world, made ILLEGAL by governments. Another causality of the war on drugs, who wrongly imprisoned thousands and caused countless victims so that a few politicians get re-elected.

2) > We have far better cures

So you’re saying there are cures. Great then. Please re-read the gp's question. For 3) as well...

I don't think this is a good counterexample given the very specific circumstances involved & clear requirements to get a vorking COVID vaccine ASAP.

OK, do you have some examples (not counter) then?

After a few years in medical research I learned a shocking truth: patents in medicine are killing more people than they are save. It’s an absolute disaster. Big pharma splintering into thousands of smaller players would be a huge improvement.

It turns out that most funding for innovation actually comes from the government. Even the esteemed Mr Musk has benefited from about 5 billion dollars of non-private money for his profitable ventures.

There is research that solidly backs this up. Taxpayers are bankrolling the industries but it's the shareholders who are reaping the rewards. It's further support for the argument that IP should not be private but rather commonly shared.