[nabla9]

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.

[thatoneuser]

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.