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> Academia should be the primary means of drug discovery. Drug manufacturing and distribution _should_ be a commodity business As mentioned below, the discover

> Academia should be the primary means of drug discovery. Drug manufacturing and distribution _should_ be a commodity business As mentioned below, the discovery is not the biggest driver of costs. But you should also ask yourself: why is this not already the case? Currently, there's nothing stopping other countries from using taxpayer money to fund drug development locally. Except, by and large, they don't - as mentioned in the article, most of the drug development that happens worldwide is funded by the United States, even for companies that are headquartered in Europe. The answer isn't that those countries aren't interested in consuming the benefits of that research, because they are more than willing to purchase those drugs that were developed in the US at lower prices. The answer is that they just choose not to fund the research, either because it's too expensive to conduct clinical trials with taxpayer money, or because it's more effective to have that funded by the market, especially when that market is US patients, rather than European taxpayers.

breatheoften 10y ago
I would be surprised if the cost of running clinical trials paid by sponsors is anywhere near the infrastructure cost needed to develop the institutions which perform them. I very much suspect that the price paid to "sponsor funding" for clinical trial research serves more as a barrier to entry to reduce competition in the drug market than it does as a means to cover the cost of running the research (with the enormous infrastructure costs paid via other means that makes running the research possible) ... and if I am right -- us taxpayers pay enormous amounts of money into infrastructure processes that then are used below cost by private companies to capture patent monopolies. Socialized risk, privatized profits. The solution is the same regardless of the behavior of other countries -- reduce the role of government granted monopolies, redirect public subsidies that go toward funding commercial clinical trials into more public development outfits, and commodities the drug production/distribution (as cost is minimal once the drug is discovered and validated for use). If we think private drug companies are actually any good at "picking winners" and dealing with risk of unknowns with respect to drug efficacy -- establish a derivatives market where they can gamble about which drugs in the development pipeline are likely to work -- and see if any of them are still around in a few years ...
Thimothy 10y ago
"Currently, there's nothing stopping other countries from using taxpayer money to fund drug development locally. Except, by and large, they don't - as mentioned in the article" Come on!! Hasn't anybody actually read the article?? Unless the economist is showing different articles to different people the only phrase that mentions research implies that is an argument made by the industry and not clear at all. The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough. It's a trivially verifiable fact. If you don't like the Economist, here's another source, showing that the US used to fund over 50% of the entire world's medical research. That number has dropped to 44% in the last decade, but only because China and India are growing so fast. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/37680135...
  - breatheoften 10y ago
    Given the lack of transparency in the billing process for health care services -- there is no part of me that thinks these numbers could provide an accurate representation of expenditures toward actual research. How much research investment actually gets funneled into direct payments towards insurance companies or hospital providers (possibly co-owned by the research funds). The space for financial gamesmanship in the way medical facilities operate in the us is so big that I there's no possibility that this kind of thing is not occurring on a large scale ... if us public/private investment into medical research is so healthy -- why have the job prospects for anyone with a biomedical degree been declining for a decade straight?

breatheoften 10y ago

I would be surprised if the cost of running clinical trials paid by sponsors is anywhere near the infrastructure cost needed to develop the institutions which perform them. I very much suspect that the price paid to "sponsor funding" for clinical trial research serves more as a barrier to entry to reduce competition in the drug market than it does as a means to cover the cost of running the research (with the enormous infrastructure costs paid via other means that makes running the research possible) ... and if I am right -- us taxpayers pay enormous amounts of money into infrastructure processes that then are used below cost by private companies to capture patent monopolies. Socialized risk, privatized profits. The solution is the same regardless of the behavior of other countries -- reduce the role of government granted monopolies, redirect public subsidies that go toward funding commercial clinical trials into more public development outfits, and commodities the drug production/distribution (as cost is minimal once the drug is discovered and validated for use). If we think private drug companies are actually any good at "picking winners" and dealing with risk of unknowns with respect to drug efficacy -- establish a derivatives market where they can gamble about which drugs in the development pipeline are likely to work -- and see if any of them are still around in a few years ...

Thimothy 10y ago

"Currently, there's nothing stopping other countries from using taxpayer money to fund drug development locally. Except, by and large, they don't - as mentioned in the article" Come on!! Hasn't anybody actually read the article?? Unless the economist is showing different articles to different people the only phrase that mentions research implies that is an argument made by the industry and not clear at all. The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough. It's a trivially verifiable fact. If you don't like the Economist, here's another source, showing that the US used to fund over 50% of the entire world's medical research. That number has dropped to 44% in the last decade, but only because China and India are growing so fast. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/37680135...
- breatheoften 10y ago
  Given the lack of transparency in the billing process for health care services -- there is no part of me that thinks these numbers could provide an accurate representation of expenditures toward actual research. How much research investment actually gets funneled into direct payments towards insurance companies or hospital providers (possibly co-owned by the research funds). The space for financial gamesmanship in the way medical facilities operate in the us is so big that I there's no possibility that this kind of thing is not occurring on a large scale ... if us public/private investment into medical research is so healthy -- why have the job prospects for anyone with a biomedical degree been declining for a decade straight?