[tus88]

> Discover a new drug for a anti-biotic resistant infection? Great, here is $500M as long as you agree to produce as much drug as needed for free or some nominal cost.

If you were going to develop the drug at your own cost with no subsidy for failure, why settle for 500M? Why not do it on your kwn merit and reap billions instead? And keep all the IP.

[vikramkr]

In other disease areas that makes sense, but for anti-biotics that 500 million is more than you'd be able to make on the market. Especially if the antibiotic is really good - the better it is the less it will be used since we want to prevent resistance developing to our best drugs. That 500 million might be necessary to make the development be worth it.