Comment by smt88
1 year ago
"Number of new drugs released" doesn't feel like a good metric for pharma productivity to me.
An ideal metric would be "person-years of increased healthspan per dollar spent by the consumer," and I'd wager that's very low because the profit motive is to create drugs that treat symptoms (and are prescribed for life) rather than cure an illness.
Most countries do exactly that. determine how much they will pay for a drug based on person years of increased health span. The term you are looking for is quality adjusted life years (QALY). Many European countries will pay up to around €80,000, and sometimes more for cancer treatments. I think France will pay 300k or so for oncology.
Cures are hard. No companies are suppressing cures that would make them tens of billions of dollars out of long term self interest. You take the cash and move on to the next one (or not).
The time value of money means that profits more than 10 years or so into the future are essentially irrelevant compared to money today.
I disagree. Curing and preventing disease brings in a pretty large paycheck for drug companies. Semaglutide is extremely effective and has made nordisk billions.
Curing cancers also will remain a particularly lucrative trade. Particularly because cancer is a million different diseases which everyone gets if they live long enough.
There is never just one person that gets a disease.
That said, it's definitely true that pharma will never spend research dollars to see if a disease can be treated with a generic drug. Universities and the NIH can and do.
What does semaglutide cure? What outside the treatment period does it prevent?
> What does semaglutide cure?
Prediabetes and hypertension. Assuming long term dietary changes, outside of treatment those effects are pretty permanent.
> What outside the treatment period does it prevent?
Again, assuming dietary changes, it'll prevent type 2 diabetes and heart attacks.
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