[yequalsx]

What about government funding research? It doesn’t have to be just rich people or corporations. It could be all of us in the form of government. I believe that most of a drug’s overall cost is marketing. I might be wrong on this but it is a significant, useless expense. Remove filthy rich profit motive and we might get drug companies that don’t resort to shenanigans.

[neuromantik8086]

In an ideal world, I'd agree with you. In the real world, government funding (at least in the US) is often administered by bureaucrats without relevant scientific expertise to ensure proper oversight. Furthermore, the checks and balances for grant awards are lacking at the NIH/NSF/etc. The panels who decide who gets funding and who doesn't comprise researchers who are far from disinterested judges. Some grant approvals are less about scientific merit and more about rubbing elbows with the right people, which ultimately means that political capital becomes more important than substance in a lot of cases. I've seen large grants funded for experiments that from a methodological standpoint, made no sense, and yet the PIs who submitted the proposal were well-established and had connections.

Corporate science, in contrast, just wants results that work and earn money and as a result is more geared towards weeding out fruitless avenues of research. My general impression is that this is sometimes at the expense of creativity, since companies are more risk-averse generally speaking, which limits what is discovered to mostly non-sexy stuff. I also suspect (but am not certain) that replications are performed more routinely, and are just file-drawered / kept as trade secrets and that the current reproducibility crises in some fields (such as cancer research) have been known about for a while in industry.

Rich people just want to cure cancer, childhood obesity, condition X that afflicts them personally. It's hard to get funding for just basic research because philanthropists generally lean towards the applied side of things as well and don't go for the moonshots. It's not the best, but typically there's some common ground for researchers to get money out of them (or some way to make basic research look applied to an undiscerning eye).

[roadnottaken]

You are simply wrong on this. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug, prior to approval and marketing. What percent of a companies budget is spend on marketing versus R&D at a given time is kind of irrelevant because (1) the development costs occur before market and (2) often drugs are in-licensed or acquired after significant expense towards R&D has been expended. They don’t buy all the companies whose products fail (most of them) so that cost isn’t factored in. Making new drugs is very expensive and risky.

Edit: I’m describing the development of novel drugs here. “Me-too” drugs are significantly less risky and probably less costly but there’s still a lot of risk amd expense.

[grasshopperpurp]

>We found that the premiums pharmaceutical companies earn from charging substantially higher prices for their medications in the US compared to other Western countries generates substantially more than the companies spend globally on their research and development. This finding counters the claim that the higher prices paid by US patients and taxpayers are necessary to fund research and development. Rather, there are billions of dollars left over even after worldwide research budgets are covered. To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...

[yequalsx]

Developing drugs costs money. Marketing them does too. Which one has more money spent on it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...