4 ms·
well in the context of developing drugs that cure disease (esp rare ones), pharma says its so expensive to do, it costs billions to develop a drug. but if in fa
by modzu 7y ago
well in the context of developing drugs that cure disease (esp rare ones), pharma says its so expensive to do, it costs billions to develop a drug. but if in fact it "costs" billions to "market" a drug then is that the same thing? i dont have a strong opinion on this
- jonlucc 7y agoI'm not super familiar with the numbers, but I believe the "billions to develop" number is a development number, if a little juiced. I think they take the total amount of R&D spend and divide it by the number of drug launches for a given period of time. So it's a good idea of how much money you have to spend to get a new launch, but it is higher than the cost of a single project, the majority of which are terminated before launch (many well before clinical trials). After you spend a couple billion per launch to make a new drug, then you spend another couple billion on marketing. Again, I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that's the position of pharma.