3 ms·

I've seen you mention marketing several times. What expenditures would you include as a marketing expense? I'm also not sure what you would define as a failure

I've seen you mention marketing several times. What expenditures would you include as a marketing expense? I'm also not sure what you would define as a failure. Drug development often starts with several candidates for a target. Over the cause of development the list is trimmed, as candidates show lack of affinity for the target or have side-effects that make them unviable. Would you consider each of the excluded candidates a failure?

beagle3 6y ago
> I've seen you mention marketing several times. What expenditures would you include as a marketing expense? I don't get to define that, companies do, but basically it includes everything that does not involve a lab, technician, doctor, nurse, statistician/programmer, etc. The US and the rest of the world are quite different here - if you've ever watched US broadcast in the evening, you'd see TONS of ads for prescription only medicine ("suffering from foo? Ask your doctor about bar"); that's marketing. Taking three hundred cardiologists on an all-expenses-paid 7-day cruise with one 30-minute "purely informative lecture about our new drug" and 7 days of fun? That's marketing too. Lobbying to congress? That's also marketing. Outside of the US, the marketing budgets are smaller and less overt - but the cruise-style legal bribe-like events are prevalent everywhere. > Would you consider each of the excluded candidates a failure? Possibly. You've described one style, but it's not the only one. Many times, it's a weird result from some other research (how Viagra was discovered, how DCA tests were started). But many things are essentially complete and utter failures - you have a line of research where no viable compound was found at all. BiondVax just failed a 15-year mission trying to develop a universal flu vaccine. Remdesivir is essentially failed even though it is FDA approved (It failed for Ebola; if you look at the data critically, it failed for SARS-COV-2 -- which the WHO's recent studies show even more clearly). There is some benefit from this research - new techniques, often new devices - but the drug itself is a failure in the sense that it will not generate any income to the company. Edit: just saw your earlier comment about marketing. It is those things (which you and I mentioned) and a lot more, but it is basically for the company to define in their books and a rule of the thumb would be “an expense a university department developing this to completion without expectation of profit would not have to spend”

beagle3 6y ago

> I've seen you mention marketing several times. What expenditures would you include as a marketing expense? I don't get to define that, companies do, but basically it includes everything that does not involve a lab, technician, doctor, nurse, statistician/programmer, etc. The US and the rest of the world are quite different here - if you've ever watched US broadcast in the evening, you'd see TONS of ads for prescription only medicine ("suffering from foo? Ask your doctor about bar"); that's marketing. Taking three hundred cardiologists on an all-expenses-paid 7-day cruise with one 30-minute "purely informative lecture about our new drug" and 7 days of fun? That's marketing too. Lobbying to congress? That's also marketing. Outside of the US, the marketing budgets are smaller and less overt - but the cruise-style legal bribe-like events are prevalent everywhere. > Would you consider each of the excluded candidates a failure? Possibly. You've described one style, but it's not the only one. Many times, it's a weird result from some other research (how Viagra was discovered, how DCA tests were started). But many things are essentially complete and utter failures - you have a line of research where no viable compound was found at all. BiondVax just failed a 15-year mission trying to develop a universal flu vaccine. Remdesivir is essentially failed even though it is FDA approved (It failed for Ebola; if you look at the data critically, it failed for SARS-COV-2 -- which the WHO's recent studies show even more clearly). There is some benefit from this research - new techniques, often new devices - but the drug itself is a failure in the sense that it will not generate any income to the company. Edit: just saw your earlier comment about marketing. It is those things (which you and I mentioned) and a lot more, but it is basically for the company to define in their books and a rule of the thumb would be “an expense a university department developing this to completion without expectation of profit would not have to spend”