The TRUTH about Drug company R&D expenses and research

[underpants]

Just the answers but you can figure out/see what the questions were.

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19537/

Can you explain?

A "me too" drug is a drug that's a minor variation of a drug already on the market. Most of what big drug companies turn out are "me too" drugs. There are, for example, six statin drugs on the market. These are cholesterol-lowering drugs of the Lipitor type. Lipitor wasn't the first statin. The first statin to come on the market was called Mevacor. It had such a large potential market that other companies realized that rejiggering the molecule a bit would allow them to have a share of this very large market. Lipitor is now the best-selling drug in the world. But it is a "me too" drug.


The pharmaceutical industry talks a lot about how much R&D costs. But the R&D is consistently less than big companies make in profits and far less than what they spend on something they usually call "marketing and administration." Companies vary a little in the name for this but it's a big category that includes all kinds of promotional activities plus administrative costs like executive salaries, legal fees and so forth. This is by far the largest part of their budgets, usually somewhere from two to two-and-a-half times what they spend on R&D.

This is a well-protected industry that depends utterly on government favors. It lives to a large extent off taxpayer-funded research done in universities and funded mainly by the NIH. It lives off government-granted monopoly rights in the form of patents and FDA-conferred exclusively. It also gets huge tax breaks, both tax deductions and tax credits. So although it talks the rhetoric of the free market, it is on welfare big time. I think this industry owes the public something for being treated so very well.

[Eurobabe]

1. good article, thanks for link

Her book sounds fascinating, I'll see if it is coming to my local library and reserve it in advance!