[xorcist]

> How did that patent end up in a big pharma portfolio?

While it may sound strange put that way, most universities spend a lot of time thinking about how spin off profitable companies from their research. It's a huge deal and public spending on research is often motivated like this. Universities and R&D companies have a codependent relationship and this is generally regarded as a good thing.

The morally dubious outcome of this is that a lot of research ends up locked away as intellectual property of some private entity, but it's not easy to question.

[username223]

> Universities and R&D companies have a codependent relationship and this is generally regarded as a good thing.

Is it? At best, I'd say it's seen as a "necessary evil," where "evil" is much more certain than "necessary."

[tomcam]

It stinks, I agree. What economic/social arrangement has done a better job in drug innovation?

[tirrit]

Has there ever been made an effort with any other approach/arrangement, in modern times?

Any sources on this, anyone?

[username223]

Publicly-funded research universities, along with the March of Dimes, funded the polio vaccine, which has almost entirely eliminated the disease, and was not patented.

[xorcist]

I think so. Funding research is difficult as it is, and the potential to leverage that spending to create jobs and tax income is important. It certainly helps that it concerns an highly qualified academic workforce. Most universities tend to keep people employed just to expedite the process.

[aaavl2821]

without for profit companies, all that taxpayer funded research would be sitting on a shelf, never becoming medicines to treat patients. In the last 2 years I think every drug that got approved by FDA was developed by a for profit company.

Drugs don't emerge fully formed from academia, just waiting for pharma to patent them and jack up the price. Pharma spends more on r&d than academia

[eecc]

Please provide conclusive proof this process is not consequence of neoliberal policies, aimed at defunding public spending and encouraging for-profit spinoffs, aligning the research process to its ideology

[ls612]

A very large portion of R&D costs for drugs are in doing phase 3 clinical trials. These will always be expensive because you have to recruit and closely monitor several thousand people with a relevant condition to determine if a treatment is better than existing alternatives and what sort of side effects a medication has. Many drugs which were developed by academia using federal dollars and which passed phase 1 and 2 trials fail phase 3. Pretty much every phase 3 trial is paid for by private industry.

[Retric]

I don’t agree that phase 3 trials must be that expensive.

Currently they cost ~19 million each which is frankly not that big of a deal. A larger issue is only ~15% of drugs make it through the process. With ~20 new drugs a year this only adds up to 2.5 billion per year which a frankly a drop in the bucket compared to drug costs.

[sonnyblarney]

If you're going to make such a conspiratorial claim, then the onus is on you to provide the proof.

I think the answer is probably a little bit more grey FYI.

[Retric]

Seems likely either drugs would end up being used, or government would stop funding drug R&D research.

Saying funding would continue without any benifits seems to be the least likely outcome. Personally, I would be fine stopping all public drug research, but I suspect more people would want to continue...

[refurb]

How would the drugs be used? They still need another 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars before they are approved?

[Retric]

Presumably, if they continue to fund research, public entities would then pay to finish the process. This would mean either fewer drugs or more money for R&D.

In the end when you change one part of the process you need to assume other parts of a related system will change in some manor.

[replicatorblog]

This is an important point. There's nothing to stop Harvard or Stanford from commercializing their research directly. They have massive endowments of financial and human capital.

The flip critique of the drug industry is to suggest they're basically taking miracle cures developed in toto in publicly-funded labs and taking pure profits.

If that were the case, shouldn't one of the dozens of well-capitalized research institutions just go to market?

The reality is the drug companies take on a tremendous burden turning high-level research into a product that works, including:

+ Formulating a product that will work at scale,

+ In widely diverse populations,

+ While eliminating potential side effects, + Adapting for human UX limitations,

+ Exhaustively guarding against adverse reactions,

+ At the same time, building production capacity,

+ Creates marketing materials for patients, but also to educate doctors who don't have scads of time to study new treatments,

+ Physically distributing the product

+ Monitoring the product fastidiously once it's on the market for negative reactions,

+ Sending humans to almost every doctor's office to answer any questions about the product,

+ While staffing a 24/7 customer service number to sort out any problems

It's not as easy as it's made out to be!