| I would like to discuss this claim that it takes a lot of money to bring a drug to market, and this is why drugs are currently so expensive. This seems to be common wisdom in this thread, but I note an extreme lack of actually cited sources, so I decided to go dig some up. I remember reading a book in 2004 discussing what percentage of medical industry profits went towards research and development, verses what percentage went towards marketing. While I cannot recall the title (I have read thousands of books since then), the idea did stick with me, and a bit of quick Googling produced some results: First, and perhaps most shocking: http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348 Here is a copy of this research without the paywall: http://www.pharmamyths.net/files/BMJ-Innova_ARTICLE_8-11-12.... According to the pop-sci summary of this article in the HufPo, what these numbers translate to is that Pharma companies spend 19 times as much on self-promotion as they do basic research:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/09/pharmaceutical-comp... If you assert that drugs are so expensive because of the cost to develop them, and yet I have demonstrated that the R&D budget is a small percentage of the money which the drug companies are spending, do you withdraw your assertion? Given the aforementioned lack of sources in this thread I somehow doubt it. Ah: I found a review/summary of the book which originally sparked this comment. It's The Truth About the Drug Companies, and is by Marcia Angell, the first female editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The review is available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-tru... More: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_customer/2011/03/... |
If you want to see what drugs cost to develop, just ask the scientists who develop them: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/09/getting_drug...
His numbers don't even pass the sniff test. If you want to find out how much it costs to develop a new drug, there is nothing stopping you from calling a CRO and asking how much they charge for phase III trials (they are all in competition, so they'll freely give you a quote).
The average cost for a phase III trial is approximately $15,000/pt/yr. 1000 patients is a pretty average size trial, so now you are at $15M for one trial and the FDA requires at least two phase III trials.
And that's just the cost of phase III trials which doesn't include: phase I, phase II, manufacturing, regulatory costs, etc. Donald Light's claim that drugs cost $45M to develop is laughable and the could only come from someone with no understanding of drug development.