Comment by daveguy
3 days ago
Profit motives for medical / biotech research, yes. What innovations have insurance companies made in the last 100 years besides to squeeze out more profit?
3 days ago
Profit motives for medical / biotech research, yes. What innovations have insurance companies made in the last 100 years besides to squeeze out more profit?
A lot of that research is primarily done in university labs, mind you. On the taxpayer dime. Somehow the research escapes a lab and Pfizer manages to put some stupid name on it and reaps billions in profit.
It requires billions of dollars and a decade+ to translate academic research into a clinical outcome. Most academic research is not reproducible or robust enough to even be replicated outside of the lab that performed it - and this will only be discovered after spending millions of dollars of private funding.
I get that completely - and you're completely correct: most research isn't ready for clinical trials let alone commercial distribution. And even then, only a small amount of reproduce-able work matures into a finalized product. Yes, there needs to be financial incentives for the private sector to find promising work, and funding the next steps once it escapes the University ecosystem. I'm all for that. But as a society we need to be clear about where the initial funding comes from, and who those are who pay for that first round of funding are.
I'm not trying to go to the mat for Big Pharma, but I'm certain that they do a lot more than slapping a stupid name on the research right at the end of the pipeline. Most universities can't fund sustained, large or diverse clinical trials, for instance; they also can't generally do the long-term post-market research/surveillance once a drug has been released.
So the only contribution of Big Pharma is that they take the risk, collect the funding and do some administrative stuff. It sounds to me like we can get rid of this middle man with some well managed governmental institutions.
4 replies →
Most pharma companies can't even fund clinical trials. That's why big pharma (Pfizers of the world) are more like holdings companies that buy smaller pharma companies (biotechs) with novel molecules and they big pharma eats the risk of putting the smaller companies' inventions through trials.
There should be a method + requirement to pay royalties back to public funding for basic research, but pharmaceutical companies really bear 99% of the risk and complexity of bringing a drug to market. It's not all that expensive to find molecules that might do something useful, it's obscenely expensive and risky to prove one does something useful.
>There should be a method + requirement to pay royalties back to public funding for basic research,
You mean the patent system? The university of california holds patents on CRISPR, for instance.
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That's a fair criticism, although I've worked in both industry and research -- a lot more directed practical research to reach commercial viability happens in industry, whereas a lot of the fundamental research happens in academia. And as a sibling commented, a lot of unreproducible research comes out of academia. Also, there are spinoffs from academia regularly that allow the original researchers to profit directly from their efforts.
Still, that doesn't justify insurance companies siphoning off money for their shareholders. Especially in these cases where they own/control both the insurance company and the pharmaceutical distribution.
I guess they have their own labs, you just never learn about their failed experiments.
> failed experiments
Wasn't that what Milla Jovovich was called in to deal with?