Comment by disgruntledphd2
12 hours ago
> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that.
This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive.
It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
Which the US had a situation exactly like that until very recently: development labs, often at Universities, with scientists paid for by grants (some private, but the majority being public, government grants), with clinical trials overseen by government agencies like the National Institute for Health (NIH), and winning research eventually being tech transferred for cheap to Pharmaceutical companies to manufacture, distribute, and market.
The companies have the biggest PR arms, so took the most credit for a system that had been balanced on a lot of government funding in the earlier, riskier stages. Eventually the marketing got so unbalanced people didn't realize how much the system was more complex than the marketing and voted for people that decided it was a "free market" idea to smash the government funding for the hard parts of science.
> It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
The market is there to risk money in the world of imperfect information trying to predict what would be good to pursue. That is one of the hardest parts of the process, but it's not even made your list.