5 ms·
To play the devil's advocate, there are 30,000 people in the US with Huntington's [0]. If all of them paid full price for the drug that comes out to 1.8B. Bring
by adenadel 10y ago
To play the devil's advocate, there are 30,000 people in the US with Huntington's [0]. If all of them paid full price for the drug that comes out to 1.8B. Bringing a drug to market costs 2.5B [1]. In order to encourage drug development for rare diseases, there needs to be some financial reward. Often more than half of a drug's patent is gone by the time that the drug is approved.
0. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/159552.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/159552.php
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-new-pharmaceutical-drug-now-exceeds-2-5b/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-n...
- jcoffland 10y agoDrug developers have a strong incentive to overstate what they spent developing a drug. Since they are the source of these numbers, I suspect they are inflated. If you were to take all of the drugs a company developed during some time period and add up their reported development costs the total would likely far exceed the companies total expenditure.
- JBReefer 10y agoThat's a strong claim that you could probably support with data with little effort, but as it stands, it's conjecture. I do agree with your analysis, but it's a weak argument to incentive.
- mikeash 10y agoTheir potential market is worldwide, and getting your R&D money back in a year or so is extremely good. I'm pretty sure the $2.5 billion/drug includes R&D "wasted" on failed drugs too. The industry gets 20-30 new drugs approved per year, and spends around $60 billion per year developing them. I mention this because one could easily see that figure and think that they'd need to make, say, $25 billion just to break even after paying for all the drugs that never made it out of development.