Comment by nozzlegear
3 days ago
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.
> So the only contribution of Big Pharma is that they take the risk
That seems to me like the big thing you're kind of glossing over. Like I said, I don't really want to go to the mat for them, but I'm sure there's plenty of risks Big Pharma corps have taken buying up research they thought would pay off and then failed to bring to market.
Maybe it'd be better to have governments buying the research and bringing it to market, but as this subthread hints at, profit is one of the big motivations for researchers to do what they do. Hopefully the government would still be paying big bucks for the research, and hopefully the taxpayers wouldn't vote in someone who wants to gut whatever arm of the government is responsible for that after enough failed purchases.
>and hopefully the taxpayers wouldn't vote in someone who wants to gut whatever arm of the government is responsible for that after enough failed purchases.
Oh, well, that would never happen now would it?
A government, by its size, can spread the risks.
1 reply →
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.