> The majority of money spent in R&D is public money. When they say "It cost $10 million to develop" it doesn't mean that's what they paid out of pocket. Most o

> The majority of money spent in R&D is public money. When they say "It cost $10 million to develop" it doesn't mean that's what they paid out of pocket. Most of it is research done at universities through grants. Do you have some citations for that? Public grant money may pay for some early-stage basic research, but clinical trials (especially the later ones) are almost always run and paid for by pharma companies, aren't they? And those are the really expensive part. > My wife was treated for MS using a cancer drug developed in the 50s. If you have cancer, the drug costs about $20. If you have MS, the drug costs $450,000+ (that was my bill). The only difference is FDA approval. No, the difference is that someone actually went and spent years researching MS, figuring out that this cancer drug could potentially treat it, ran multiple phases of clinical trials to show that it was effective and THEN got FDA approval. Why would any company go through all this trouble if you could just buy the generic cancer drug from a competitor at the end?