A markup of 279,000% over production costs

[El_Johns]

49. They spend more on advertising by a long shot.

Big Pharma might be working a lot harder to sell you products than to develop new ones.

Prescription drug companies aren't putting a lot of resources toward new, groundbreaking medication, according to a recent report in BMJ, a medical journal based in London. Instead, it's more profitable for them to simply to create a bunch of products that are only slightly different from drugs already on the market, the reports authors said.

"Pharmaceutical research and development turns out mostly minor variations on existing drugs," the authors write. "Sales from these drugs generate steady profits throughout the ups and downs of blockbusters coming off patents."

The authors go on to say that for every dollar pharmaceutical companies spend on "basic research," $19 goes toward promotion and marketing.

The BMJ study isn't the first time pharmaceutical companies have been accused of putting their own profits ahead of the health of their customers. Lexchin, a professor at York University's School of Health Policy and Management, was the co-author of another study in 2008 that argued that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on research and development.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/09/pharmaceutical-companies-marketing_n_1760380.html


Government does most of the basic R&D for pharma.


Industry R&D risks and costs are often significantly reduced by taxpayer-funded research, which has helped launch the most medically important drugs in recent years and many of the best-selling drugs, including all of the top five sellers in one recent year surveyed (1995).

An internal National Institutes of Health (NIH) document, obtained by Public Citizen through the Freedom of Information Act, shows how crucial taxpayer-funded research is to top-selling drugs. According to the NIH, taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development of the top five selling drugs in 1995. (See Section III)

https://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID=7065