I imagine the Hep C drugs are some of the more monetizable drugs though and will need to rake in more money to subsidize the development of niche drugs.
Those numbers are sign of incredible waste and wrong incentives.
The incentives in drug industry are towards developing patentable molecules and techniques, not for discovering new ways to cure things. There is too much overlapping development, not actual drug discoveries that provide net benefits for the society in exchange for patent monopoly. When some discovers a new chemical entity (NCE) and gets it approved, competitors spend massive amount of money developing new molecular entities (NME) that do the same thing with slightly different molecule.
Then those srug companies use evergreening and pay-for-delay that adds several billions annually.
Governments should look very critically to drug patents start paying only for actual discoveries.
But sometimes new chemicals do cure things. Or at the very least treat them well enough to make life worth living. I'd much rather exist in a world with AIDS medicine than a world where you just die, even if I'd rather have a cure.
I take different medicines that improve my quality of life. Without one I would never be able to realize one of my most valuable potentials. I could sit here and complain that we don't yet have the medical knowledge to indefinitely prolong life (which I do), but at the same time I have the humility to appreciate that being born even a few decades before in the long history of humanity and I would have had a much lesser life.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for pharma to take a more efficient and satisfactory path, but I definitely recognize how life is better thanks to it.
What a terrible analysis. Pretty sure that number is just the "Selling, marketing and administrative expenses" line from the 10-K, which lumps all expenses outside of COGs, R&D and a few others.
That's not just marketing as people know it. It's all the other costs of running a company too.
Except drugs are different from other products. If a drug is actually a good idea for patients, with no profit motive behind it, it will sell itself. Doctors should be aware of the drugs the big drug manufacturers are producing, and prescribe accordingly based on need. If you need to hawk your drug by plastering TV ads all over the place, or by having salespeople push it to hospitals / etc., it's arguably not a necessary drug.
> If a drug is actually a good idea for patients, with no profit motive behind it, it will sell itself.
This is completely false.
There's a once-daily pill that prevents contracting HIV, yet most of the people who have the greatest risk of contracting HIV (Black gay men) aren't taking it. Why? According to mountains of peer-reviewed research, the predominant factor is that they don't know it exists. That is literally a marketing problem.
For patients who are aware of the drug, the most common reported reason for not taking it is that they can't find doctors who know it exists (or how the treatment regimen works). Again, this is literally a marketing problem.
In the case of this drug, there are additional barriers for many of these groups beyond just knowing of its existence, but that's the first and biggest one. It is 100% false to say that a drug that is a good idea for patients will "sell itself".
I can only think one or two examples of drugs that "sold themselves". The new HCV meds are a good example of a lot of pent up demand even prior to approval. That said, there were still physicians out there that were not aware of the approval, so marketing still had work to do.
> I can only think one or two examples of drugs that "sold themselves". The new HCV meds are a good example of a lot of pent up demand even prior to approval. That said, there were still physicians out there that were not aware of the approval, so marketing still had work to do.
Exactly - incredible demand for them, and even still Sovaldi didn't sell itself.
If a drug is actually a good idea for patients, with no profit motive behind it, it will sell itself.
This is entirely untrue.
The one thing I learned in the biotech space is that doctors range from those doing research and know all about the cutting edge drugs all the way to doctors who are surprised to learn about a new drug that was approved a year ago. And there are way more of the 2nd kind.
Changes to how conditions are treated actually happens really slowly. What often hinders adoptation of new drugs is information and that’s a key goal of marketing - actually letting doctors know something new is available.
And that's not to slam them. They often treat a ton of different diseases, and a new drug launch isn't the highest priority for them. They'll eventually learn about it, so marketing is an attempt to accelerate that.
Doctors don't just become magically aware of new drugs, it's not like every MD gets a newsletter a la "here's what shows are coming to Netflix". Treatments compete over the condition/disease just like any competitive market, even if a drug has a patent.
From the link, it looks like it costs ~$10bn per successful drug, at the top end of that list.
Australia paid $750m for 5 years access.
Australia has ~1/10th the population of the United States. and ~1/3rd the population of the UK.
If just the UK, USA and Australia paid at that same rate (per capita) then they would cover that 10bn average development cost in 5 years.
Seems like it's a good suggestion