-

then again, you might be right.
=========

sick fuckers

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Give me your money, or I'll let your loved ones die.
=========

Greedy!

They are making obscene profits and raise their prices every year.

Profit is the only and true motive. Everything else, legally, is secondary and also, the hidden cost burden is paid by the society and environment. They have no obligations in regards to their secondary impact.

How could anyone expect any form of altruism when they are legally required to create wealth for their investors?

We would need to change corporate charter law in some way to even allow for public benefit and altruism. There would have to be some form of law pertaining to the benefit commons and to account for various forms of economic and environmental impact that was tied to their profit margin and I don't mean ordinary taxes, the tend to not pay much taxes.

Right now, it's open season on anybody and anything and when you consider the megalithic proportions of many big corporations, they have a sweet deal and a free ride in that respect, plus they are obviously subject to a special form of socialism that they enjoy exclusively and the welfare they collect is huge and built-in now.

Ah, but socialism and welfare are bad when it comes to the people. Dignity of work and all that nonsense.

Just wait until they accelerate the coming wave of AI/automation and eliminate even more jobs on many levels, from blue collar to white collar and even some professional fields.

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maybe that's because you're right!
===========

what ever they can, within the bounds of law, to make profits. It's the government's job to pass laws and regulations to rein corporations in.

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Thank you.

I agree with your post totally, and we should've done something about it when the Dems had control and created the Obamacare (ACA), but they didn't.

That's another thing I'm trying to figure out.

Why didn't they?
========

during the Obama administration's first two years. From September 24, 2009 until February 4, 2010. It was a miracle the ACA passed at all. The ACA passed the House with a public option and other things that had to be taken out in the Senate to get those 60 votes in a very short period of time. That's what happened.

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are you saying that some of the democrats weren't willing to vote for it, or was it the republicans that jinxed the whole thing?
============

Al Franken describes it in his excellent book "Al Franken, Giant of the Senate":

"Finally, for the first time, the Democrats actually had the sixty votes we would need to move forward on health care. The bad news was that we would need every single one of those sixty votes. Which meant every single one of us had a veto. ... Still, the math was the math, and it forced us to make some tough compromises. A handful of moderate-to-conservative Democrats were opposed to the public option, which would have increased competition in the insurance market. Gone. Some floated the idea of lowering the age for Medicare to fifty-five. Hmmmm. Not a bad idea. ... Okay. Let's do it! But then Joe Lieberman announced on Face the Nation that he was against it. Gone."

Joe Lieberman (I think he was an Independent at the time) is largely to blame.

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at least they got something passed, and it has held up in court., so that's a positive.

I never liked Joe Lieberman anyway, and he used to be my state senator when I lived in Connecticut.

Then he became an Independent.

Wait a minute, maybe I'm wrong about him being from Connecticut. That was thirty years ago... damn, I'm starting to get a headache.

Anyway, thank you once again for the info.
=============

Tired of debunking misinformation.

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thank you.
===========

it becomes a civil matter that shareholders of public corporation can sue officers of corp they feel are not maximizng shareholder value. in some cases, maximizing shareholder value means eschewing profits in favor of growth such as in the case of companies like Amazon and Netflix to name just 2.

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your kind reply.
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Pharmaceutical companies are doing what every corporation does, trying to make a profit to reward their executives, their stock holders and to a smaller extent, their employees. If the product of the company helps people, that is a side effect that may help them in marketing and employment, but no one should expect them to be altruistic.

Keep in mind how expensive it is to do pharmaceutical research, and that most researchers are highly educated scientists who are being paid in accordance to the time, effort, and money spent to achieve their education. The equipment, supplies, chemicals, etc. are very expensive and constantly need updating. This is in addition to usual corporate needs such as patent attorneys, sales people, and ancillary personnel who keep the company running and product distributed.

Most of the reason that the vast majority of medical treatments have been discovered in the US is because of the profit motive. Socialized countries just don't have the incentive to attract top researchers, and spend the kind of money required to make major breakthroughs, no matter how much they want to be altruistic.

The more socially-aware pharmaceutical companies will reduce the cost of a given medication once their research costs are recovered, which often takes several years since most are targeted towards specific diseases that are not widespread.

The only way to change this structure is for the government to allocate more funds towards medical research and drug development.

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I'd still like to know what these R&D cost really are in relation to the drug prices and how much profit they actually make, especially since they seem to make money no matter what.

Is there anyplace on the web to go looking for them?

I can't seem to find anything myself.

Thank you for sharing.
=========

Your doubts about my integrity come from where exactly?

Let me give you a partial list the number of people who go into making a drug, the overwhelming number of which fail in clinical trials:

Synthetic chemists, ethnobotanists, toxicologists, analytical chemists, bioanalytical chemists, prep chemists, veterinarians, ethicists, physiologists, virologists, molecular modelers, chemical engineers, process chemists, biomedical engineers, formulators, regulatory affairs staff, and of course the physicians and nurses overseeing the clinical trials, not only in the inventor companies, but in all the support countries, internationally.

I'm sure I left some classes of people people out.

Almost all of these people worked their asses off in college, suffered through graduate school, many did post docs, and many spent hours traveling, reading, struggling.

Let me tell you a story from my life: We made three metric tons of a key intermediate for one of the first AIDS drugs, and there was an impurity out of specification - slightly out of specification. The pharmaceutical company had to decide whether to take that intermediate, run in through the process, and see if the impurity would concentrate in subsequent steps. If the intermediate were not delivered people would die from lack of the drug. Die. Get it? Die? People in four countries discussed all of the options on the phone. While chemists in my company worked to attempt to isolate the impurity and characterize it, working late into the night, the pharmaceutical company, at their risk decided to ask us to ship the intermediate across the Atlantic, while regulatory experts decided on how to address the problem without compromising quality. If the lot had failed, not only would people die, but the pharmaceutical company would lose millions of dollars. Their chemists stayed up night working with samples shipped overnight to do use tests to show that at least on lab scale, the impurity would not carry through the synthesis.

All of us struggled with a huge ethical conundrum...many of us lost sleep.

As it worked out, the risk accepted by the pharmaceutical company did not compromise the product and lives were saved.

The people who do these things are pharmaceutical companies.

Many have worked for years only to have their projects fail, often at enormous expense. Many work well into the night, and sometimes through the night, because people are dying. That, I'm sure, is happening right now, involving tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of highly trained scientists, all of whom risk failure, or risk being "scooped" by a better product than the one they bring to market.

It's pretty funny how people hate scientists who work on life saving medications until they have an incurable disease, whereupon they seem to expect that people who put in all this challenging - and even sometimes dangerous - work like hell, but are not allowed to have the temerity to like to get paid and maybe appreciated, just a little bit.

All this is happening now, in the days of Covid. If you think all the people working on this are doing so because of the dollar signs in their eyes, well, it says more about you than it does about the people doing the work. There is a very materialistic set of people who seem to think that the only reason anyone does anything is about money.

I go to work every day - because human lives are involved in what I do - and, as a high risk individual, thinking I might die from exposure.

How was your day?

Filled with the pleasure of talking down to your moral inferiors I'm sure.

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I'm on a fact finding mission, and you have been a great help.

Thank you.
===========

I certainly didn't interpret as what you were doing as "fact finding." The tone was clearly accusatory in my opinion.

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you must think I'm a horrible person if you believe that, but honestly, I really do appreciate what you shared with us.

You're perceptions are way off on me though.
=======

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From what I've gathered so far, and even though it's still a little fuzzy, I think I made a mistake in complaining about the democrats and the pharmaceutical companies.

As far as pharmaceutical companies are concerned, I'm not sure if my original conclusion was correct, but I still hope the democrats do something about their drug prices when they take over in November.

That and doing something about banks and pot shops.

As far as what you told me about yourself, you have nothing to do with drug pricing, but you do have to carry the heavy burden of worrying whether or not you've done enough to make them safe.

That makes you one of the good guys, and I want to personally thank you for that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
=======

"I'm on a fact finding mission..."

Were that the case, you'd be researching relevant and peer-reviewed sources (unless of course, finding facts is a task you;ve never learned how to do)

But we get it... you have to maintain a particular pretense to better rationalize your series of non-sequitur responses and assorted logical fallacies.

I've heard it can be quite fun if in you're into that sort of thing.

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I've found out a lot of facts, here and on the web.

I've done research before, and I always do it when I make a statement and people disagree with me.

I have a website about the unexplained, missing persons and serial killers. The research behind that was a major project, looking for anything that was credible, but what I found out was that most of the unexplained cases weren't. There were some. but not a lot. I also found out that a lot of people write books about the unexplained, but some don't even do the research and just copy from other books.

I made one about pharmaceuticals, and a lot of people disagreed with me.

It's always a good idea to ask for help, and that's the reason for this thread.

I've found out that I was mostly wrong, but thank you for sharing.
===========

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we can't.

I haven't gotten that far in my research, so I don't know if that's true, but it's still a good question.
============

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more, but some people in this thread have said they can't be, because they're corporations.

That kind of makes sense to me, but I'm not fully on board with it yet.

I need to do more research.
===================

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I'm not fully on board with that idea yet, because it just seems like a lousy excuse to rob people.

I need to find out HOW they decide to price a drug first, but thanks for sharing.
==========

... are surely altruistic, but not the executives at the top so much.

And maybe even those executives would be more altruistic in a different system? Corporations were designed to focus on profits.

Apparently, investors in the past considered it too much work for them to manage businesses themselves. So corporations were legally defined with profit-focused safeguards so the actual managers wouldn't forget to make more money for the investor class. (That's my interpretation of what happened when corporations were legally defined long ago, anyway.)

Some of those companies are shady as hell. I used to regularly get injections of an anti-cancer drug called Avastin in my eyes. It was meant as a treatment for colon cancer, to be administered by IV's, but it didn't work very well. So hospitals often stopped using it.

Later, some ophthalmologists in Florida decided to try that drug to treat macular degeneration of the eyes. It worked great for that application! So ophthalmologists all around the country bought unused bags of the drug from hospitals and divided it into much smaller doses to be injected in the eyes of their macular degeneration patients.

Was the company (Genentech) satisfied with the good fortune that others found a way to use that drug successfully? Nope.

They instead followed it up with their own research and applied for FDA approval for a slight chemical alteration (which they called Lucentis) to use it for treating macular degeneration.

THEN they appealed to the government to make the injection of Avastin into eyes illegal! They argued that eye doctors could be careless and allow Avastin to get contaminated with microbes otherwise!

Meanwhile, they would charge over $2000 for each injection of Lucentis while Avastin usually cost less than $300 per injection!

Thankfully, eye doctors all over the country basically told Genentech to eat shit, because they were going to continue to offer the cheaper Avastin to their patients! Genentech then backed down from their government efforts.

Thank you, medical doctors!!

I struggled to pay for Avastin back then, and I would've definitely went blind if I had to pay over $2000 per shot instead. And because the FDA approval of Lucentis was only for age-related macular degeneration (the most common problem), and not my type of macular degeneration, my health insurance wouldn't have helped to pay for it just like they didn't pay for my Avastin injections.

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That's the kind of thing that bothers me, but I'm still not finding any info on why companies charge so much.

Are they really doing it to recoup R&D cost?

I remember that EpiPen fiasco all to well, but they did give a lot of them away to needy families, so there's that.
=============

I haven't needed those shots in years. I'll spare you the long story, but basically I developed scar tissue behind the cracks of an elastic membrane (which is itself behind the retina), and that stopped my problem in my one remaining good eye.

I went blind pretty fast in the other eye because the problems started in that eye shortly before Avastin was discovered by ophthalmologists to be a fantastic treatment.

And bear in mind that Medicare and other health insurance companies paid the much higher price for Lucentis if that's what age-related macular degeneration patients chose instead of Avastin, despite how numerous trials had shown they worked equally well as a treatment. But Genentech's marketing team worked hard to advertise Lucentis as superior and safer, so naturally that's what more elderly patients chose. So bigger payouts from the insurance companies were the result.

Genentech claimed they had to charge that much to recuperate the costs of FDA approval.

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I'm sorry to hear about your eye.

How much does the FDA charge for this?

Why are we (the government) even charging for that?

Some of it is life-changing shit!

Damn, I'm gonna have to do some research on that also.

Anyway, thank you for sharing
=======

Large groups of test subjects have to be found, etc.

I suspect that Genentech was price-gouging, anyway. They had already demonstrated their greed when they tried to outlaw Avastin for eye treatments.

Thanks. One good eye seems to be serving me well, and I'm so thankful that I still have it!

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as a business expense?

Yeah, Genentech seems to be a greedy bunch, but I do agree that the scientist and a lot of the other people there might be altruistic.

I also have to find out why it cost so much.

Aren't we (the government) already paying the people at the FDA? What are the other cost?

Sorry, just thinking out loud, but thanks for the info.
===========

... but you might be correct?

That Genentech story was up-close and personal for me, and I never really researched it beyond that.

I think Genentech was bought-out by an even bigger pharmaceutical company later? My memory could be wrong, though.

Edit: Google shows they're still around, so I don't know why I thought that.

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because lately, I've been wrong about a lot of things.

I'll have to do more research tomorrow, I'm tired right now, but thank you again.
===========

I just noticed that Genentech recently expanded the FDA approval for other types of macular degeneration (it was only approved for age-related MD originally):
https://www.gene.com/media/press-releases/14708/2018-03-21/fda-approves-genentechs-lucentis-ranibiz

There's NO WAY they'd bother with my rare condition. The genetic condition only affects about 1 in 50,000 people (early-age blindness being the main problem).

Glad that I got SUPER lucky with scar tissue. My particular case is extremely unusual. I'd surely still need those injections about once a month otherwise.

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I'll read the article tomorrow, but thank you.
=========

...the clinical trials.

That would have saved them embarrassment and you $2000 a shot. Everybody wins, right?

One of the the things that someone has to do for an ocular drug is to bioanalysis in aqueous humor. To do this, one needs to built a calibration curve in a blank, quality control samples in a blank. How many people do you know who donate aqueous humor by tolerating an injection in their eyes? As a practical matter, one needs cadaver aqueous humor, and it can take years to accumulate enough to develop and validate a bioanalytical method. Or else one has to justify using bovine aqueous humor or rabbit aqueous humor, which involves analyzing all of the components in various species and submitting an argument to regulatory that they are "close enough." (This is, by the way, what almost always happens but...

...Have you ever tried to buy human aqueous humor? What do you think it costs?)

Avastin is an engineered protein. There are three ways to do bioanalysis in a protein, one by digestion, another by a technique known as ELISA, which involves raising antibodies in animals, isolating them, purifying them qualifying them and storing them until they're needed - the latter being no small issues - and the latter being intact high resolution mass spec.

A high resolution mass spec runs between half a million dollars and over a million dollars - these instruments are sensitive enough to measure billionths of a gram. For more than half a century, hundreds of thousands of professors, grad students, electrical engineers, materials scientists, physicists, computer scientists, biochemists have worked to make these instruments work. They are not run by high school students, and the data isn't interpreted by game show hosts.

Now, once Genentech, that greedy company filled with rapacious executives who live to rip you off, decided to "invest" in making the anti-angiogenic drug Avastin approved for ocular injections, they just didn't write in on the label, "Oh yeah, you can inject in an eye too!"

They would have faced fines of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars for doing so.

They had to do animal studies, probably with rabbits, including bioanalysis, and perhaps with monkeys. What do you think it costs to maintain a colony of monkeys? Cheap? Easy? They had to have highly trained veterinarians administer the drug to the eyes of rabbits and monkeys. They had to design a syringe with a narrow enough bore to inject eyes - no small feat for a viscous protein solution, in fact a major problem for every protein drug. They had to make sure that the materials in that syringe did not leach any polymer antioxidants that destroyed the activity of the drug, and conduct stability trials lasting three to four years, paying chemists to analyze (with mass specs and/or HPLC) samples stored under rigorously controlled conditions involving back up generators, all kinds of sensors to continuously record temperature and humidity, using multiple methods that required weeks of high level scientists work to develop, and weeks more to validate.

While all this is going on, they needed to get to a point, after multiple meetings with regulatory authorities at the FDA, EMA, Health Canada, etc, etc, at which they could recruit people willing to have their eyes injected with an experimental drug. These people are paid of course, to be subjects, but it's only a small part of the costs. A clinical trial research organization employs nurses, pharmacists, statisticians, and physicians to continuously monitor all events associated with the trial.

After all of this a report is issued - a book length report - and returned to the regulatory authorities for review.

If everything fits together, if the drug is safe, and effective for the treatment of macular degeneration, then, and only then, can the greedy executives at Genentech begin to rape their customers by charging them to save their eyesight.

And let's be clear about something OK? Genentech executives know damned well that the injection can be achieved by cowboy doctors using approved Avastin for cancer treatments off label.

Nevertheless, they were willing to try to get the drug approved for a small population whose eyesight might be saved.

For all this, they wanted to (gasp) make some money. You know, I think my mechanic should fix my car at a loss because, well, damned, I need to get to work, don't I?

Greedy bastards.

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you never did answer the question.

Isn't all that cost a tax write off as a business expense?
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Last edited Sat Aug 8, 2020, 05:21 PM - Edit history (1)

...because I'm having a real, real, real, real, hard time understanding at what it is you're trying to get.

Are you asking whether for tax reasons, drug development is free to anyone who does it?

You do know, don't you, that there are people who lose everything when a drug program fails...or do you?

No, drug development is not free, and in fact, it a high risk business, as anyone who has worked in it knows.

I have supported projects - omapatrilat comes to mind - on which billions of dollars were spent - it was in the pre-NDA stage - and it was never approved, not a single pill sold, although personally I think that was a mistake because I suspect that more people died because it wasn't available, than would have died from its serious side effect, but that's just my opinion, and not that of the FDA scientists, who I will admit, were better trained than I am..

The Rise and Fall of Omapatrilat

Every industry can write off some expenses, but no, R&D is not free for any company. Pharmaceutical companies can and do fail in a business sense as well as in a technical sense. They can and do make a profit on their investments, just like car companies, computer companies, food companies.

Food companies are more essential than are pharmaceutical companies. Do you actively question whether they make a profit? Should food companies be examined to see if they are altruistic? Why this special focus on the need for altruism in pharma companies? How about book companies? They are important cogs in education of children, are they not? Should we wonder if book companies are altruistic? Of course, we do under fund our schools, and make highly unreasonable demands on teachers, and now actively threaten their health. Should they do what they do out of altruism? (I'm not denying that some do, when I ask this, but I am not expecting it should be required of them) I get a strong feeling that you're engaged in selective attention.

Perhaps your life is entirely altruistic in your own estimation with whatever it is you do, but as a pharmaceutical scientist, I don't feel a shred of altruistic appreciation of what we do, in my industry, in any of your questions.

Although you deny it, I sense hostility to what we do in my industry.

Now, I'm not here to say that everything I've seen in my career is entirely honorable - I have seen things I abhorred - but I question whether there is any industry that can make the claim of complete moral purity.

It is also true that some drugs of importance were discovered in academic institutions using grants, and that NIH scientists have advanced science, but the reality is that these institutions - including the government, to whom companies with which I've worked have paid royalties - profit from their input as well. It's not why they do what they do, but they do profit. The new chemistry building at Princeton University was built with pharmaceutical royalties.

I can't think of any major drug that was discovered and developed in a purely socialist nirvana with no one making a dime.

It is neither immoral nor unwise to expect reward for your work.

I am a life long Democrat, and a political liberal who believes in justice and human rights, but I am tired of my industry being treated like some kind of bogey man by people in this party.

You're so concerned about altruism? How about reading about Dr. Roy Vagelos, the former President of Merck. I've heard him speak on what it took to bring HepB vaccines to China. He had to fight everyone - including some in the Chinese government - but fight he did, because it was the right thing to do.

How about his work on curing river blindness?

You think Merck made a ton of money off those children on the rivers in Africa whose families lived on less than a dollar a day?

Dr. Vagelos gave a shit about humanity. I've known thousands of people in my industry who have worked day and night to live up to his example.

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I really DO understand what you're trying to say.

This is what I'm trying to find out.

Are pharmaceuticals overcharging for their drugs?

Let's say it cost one million dollars to R&D, get FDA approval, clinic trials, market the drug, labor, shipping, insurance etc. etc.

(I know it cost more than that, but please, just hear me out)

Let's say the company expects to sell one million doses, and sets the price according.

I also know that they have to give some of that money to the stockholders.

Now, what do you think the fair price of that drug should be?

I believe that 2 or 3 dollars a dose would be a reasonable price to pay, but what do you think?

You're a person who's been in the business. I value your opinion without the hostility please.

I also believe if a company charges twice that, $6, then they're gouging, but what do you think?

The problem I'm having is finding out what the total cost of a drug really is.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
===============

Last edited Sat Aug 8, 2020, 08:02 PM - Edit history (1)

One million dollars can't even start a lab:

There are lots of these diagrams on the internet:



I've seen numbers that are smaller - depending on the therapeutic area - and numbers that are much larger, but a good working figure for bringing a new drug to market is one billion dollars.

In general, a company has 17 years on its patent life. It general takes 10 to 12 years to bring a new drug to market. This means you have five to seven years to make all that money back. If the drug is for a rare disease with only a few thousands of patients, the price will decidedly not be three dollars.

A company called Spark Therapeutics developed a drug - a gene therapy - that cures a rare form of blindness with a few injections. People who couldn't see, can see, with just a few injections.

This form of gene therapy was of a type of treatment that had never succeeded in any previous attempts.

It involves two injections, six days apart.

Now, it is an issue in our society to figure out how much a single person's eyesight is worth, but I can assure you that this drug would not exist were it to see for 3 dollars a treatment.

It is a severe financial risk, by the way, to develop a drug that cures a disease, because if someone takes it for two weeks and gets better, it is difficult to recoup one's investment. Maintenance drugs are much better investments. This is a moral problem, of course, and sometimes it proves worthwhile to cure a disease. Gilead bought Sofosbuvir, discovered by Michael Sofia for billions of dollars by acquiring Pharmasett. It cures Hepatitis C for most patients. Of course there were a lot of people who were infected (but not yet symptomatic) with Hep C. It eliminates the infection.

It saved the world hundreds of billions of dollars, of course, because HepC is a tragic disease that was widespread.

Now that it is near elimination, it doesn't make much sense however to bet your future income on Sofobuvir, does it?

We have a problem on this planet inasmuch as we are not developing anti-infective agents because at a billion dollars a drug, it may not make sense to invest in them, since you are likely to lose money.. I don't have an answer for that problem, but no, bashing pharmaceutical scientists and telling them they need to provide medications for $3.00 a pill is not going anywhere.

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didn't you read this part:

(I know it cost more than that, but please, just hear me out)

In your example, my 3$ drug would cost $3,000.

Do you honestly think that's reasonable? If your figures are right, and I assume they are, then that would be a reasonable price, but what if they charged $6,000 instead. I think that would be gouging.

If it's for a really rare disease, the price would probably be a hell of a lot more than $3,000 anyway.

It's probably why drug companies don't spend much time or money on developing drugs for really rare diseases.

But I'm sure some do.

Anyway, 1 billion dollars is a nice figure, but what does that break down to?

That's where I'm having my problems, and thank you again.
============

...to provide 100 million doses of it at $10/dose to recover your investment, but you need to add manufacturing costs - manufacturing done under very rigorous controlled conditions - just to break even.

That should be pretty clear.

If you can't sell a 100 million doses, you need to charge considerably more per dose. You need to recover all that money in five to seven years, before you lose your patent and generic companies can produce your drug for manufacturing costs only, paying much less for development than an innovator company. (They still need to do "bioequivalence" trials, but these are far cheaper than what is involved in innovation.)

Example If 10 million people have Covid and we can cure their disease for 2 pills a day for 10 days, that's 20 pills per person, 80 million doses, that would be $250 per cure - if we totally ignore all the people who failed to make the drug but spent close to a billion working on their failure - and ignore manufacturing costs, shipping costs, storage costs etc, and of course, without any reward for the people who took the scientific and financial risks of developing the drug.

I would reasonably expect a vaccine for this disease to be fairly expensive, but the cost would be spread over billions of people who would ideally take it. If it requires frequent boosters - and it may well do so - it will be a blockbuster drug, worth tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars.

What's worth more, Jeff Bezos making it possible for you to buy Christmas doilies on line, or rewarding someone for saving the lives that would be saved if we stopped Covid in its tracks; if we were able to cure infected people?

For curative agents, if it's $3000/cure, this would still be much cheaper than two weeks in an ICU on a respirator, wouldn't it?

The reality is that these things are very, very, very, very high tech. People don't whine about paying for their cell phones, their TV's, their meals in restaurants, their Tesla electric cars, but a drug that would save their lives is always "too expensive."

We live in a weird culture.

It turns out that because of certain incentives, people do develop "orphan" drugs for "orphan" diseases, but they are enormously expensive per dose. It comes down to a question of whether the insurance company will save money by treating you or by dealing with the consequences of hospitalizations, etc.

That's a cold fact.

By the way, in the last five years, the makers of 90% of prescriptions sold today - generic drug companies - show many examples of companies losing money hand over fist. That wasn't true ten years ago, but it is true now.

It's easy now to figure it out the whole deal though. It's a billion dollars to develop - rule of thumb, some drugs cost considerably more, others less - you then need to multiply the number of patients and the number of doses per patient and divide it into development plus manufacturing costs and bingo! You're there if the goal is no one makes (gasp) a profit.

Spark's drug does not cost $3000. It's more like a million dollars per treatment. What is the lifetime worth of a child who couldn't see being able to see?

I would like to have every blind child be able to see, but there is some realities between here and there that are not amenable to solution by finger wagging.

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I can see why you're so passionate about this.

Now don't get all crazy on me, but the only problem I have with what you said is how can companies lose money and still pay their stockholders, or are they losing money after they pay the dividends?

That last part really don't make any sense.

Do you know the names of these companies or where I can find them?
==========

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I can't really believe they're fixing prices, but the 10% that are making money do make me wonder though.

This five to seven years to make their money back is probably part of the problem, and these generic companies that sell their product for less are taking advantage w/o paying for the R&D is just wrong.

Some companies even get extended patents (according to another poster here), and some also manipulate prices of the drugs after they expire when there's no competition (according to Bloomberg).

In conclusion, this extended patent and the expired price manipulation doesn't sound right, although, I really do believe five to seven years to make their cost back is outrageously too short a period of time to do it.

It should be extended to twenty years, with the provision that they justify their prices openly and completely, including what all the ACTUAL cost of developing the drug were or are.

What do you think? Is this feasible?

Anyway, thank you for the link and also being kind enough to supply it.
==========

...they were Democrats?

There are laws against corruption, and laws against price fixing. If we enforce and obey the laws there isn't a problem, is there?

I have very, very, very, very, little use for posters here looking at the Pharmaceutical Industry through Martin Shkreli and some executives engaging in price fixation and saying that this characterized the entire industry.

In general, most posters here don't know shit from shinola about the pharmaceutical industry and I do.

I have tried, without losing too much of my temper, although I'm really, really, really having a hard time patiently to try to explain to you the rigors and difficulties of this industry and the struggles of the people in it, and you keep returning to bad apples and assholes complaining about patent extensions.

Patent life for pharmaceuticals is too short, that is clear.

Basically, the rules for doing so kill people, because while we work to save lives, people in our industry should not be made broke when our companies collapse around us.

I saw a drug that would have saved lives dropped in phase 2 because someone in a preclinical phase made a decimal error in a calculation. Hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent on it, but because of this error, correcting it would have taken two to three years off its patent life. To bring the drug to market would have been too expensive; it would have definitely lost money.

Let me ask you something: If your paycheck depended on working for a company - would you strongly advocate for a project, any project, that might drive it under? Are you so filled with altruism that you don't need a paycheck? If so, lucky you.

I'm not even reading half the shit in this thread, because I hear it all the time. In the early 1990's I saw people working day and night, fingers to the bone, no lunch, no dinner, no time with their families to save the lives of people dying of AIDS. At the same time, we had demonstrators telling us we didn't care because the victims were mostly gay.

YOU keep pointing to flaws in our industry. You seem upset that 10% of the pharmaceutical companies are making money and seem to be wondering why they're not all bankrupt. You seem to think that pharmaceutical companies should never make a profit, and if they do, they're corrupt.

Do you feel that way about Apple Computer? How about Telsa cars? Amazon? General Foods? General tire? Sony? Every time you pull out your credit card to buy one of these products are you wondering about price fixing? Corruption?

I hope you never face a painful debilitating disease that requires treatment with a pharmaceutical product. But if you do take a pharmaceutical, it will be because we endured this continuous abuse and questioning of our motives.

I am a life long Democrat. This is because I care about human rights, education, racism, building peace, addressing poverty, eliminating poverty, fighting racism, and issues in the environment: persistent halogenated pollutants, climate change, the depletion of resources in the periodic table.

There are two political parties with the power to change things in this country; one of them is changing things for the worse, the other is working to change things for the better. I'm voting and always have voted for the party to change things for the better, irrespective of what Blagojevich and Dan Rostenkowski have done.

I am not a socialist however. And I sincerely dislike and abhor the people in my party - and they clearly exist - who carry forth endlessly on subjects about which they clearly know nothing at all; the pharmaceutical industry is just one of those things.

If you think the pharmaceutical industry is just oozing with corruption, the next time you're sick, and your doctor prescribes medicine, don't take it.

That will teach us, won't it?

This conversation is concluded on the grounds that you clearly want to focus in negative minutiae and have no interest in real understanding. I don't think I've succeeded in teaching you a damned thing.

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I agree with you that pharmaceuticals should make money.

And, if you think ALL pharmaceuticals are clean as the driven snow, then that's just as bad as thinking just because one company is bad, all companies are bad.

Anyway, thanks you for sharing.
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SG&A are all the expenses to run a company not directly attributable to production or performance of finished goods or services.
Sales & marketing people, R&D, administration like HR, legal, etc.
Since these are legitimate expenses under GAAP, there are no taxes paid, because those costs are directly taken from top line revenue.
This is anything BUT unique to pharma.
As a member of R&D, quality, and technological management, not a dime I ever made was included in the cost of goods.
But, the company paid me out of revenues, just the same as a line worker's pay or a raw material.
That's how the accountants siloize the total nonproduction costs.
Almost no expenses to the company are taxable.
We don't tax revenues. We tax profits. Taxes on these costs, and wondering if their tax free is a wild goose chase.
Of course, they're not taxed!
Now, you might be able to understand why some drugs cost so much.
The salaries of hundreds of people for 2 or 3 years working on something generating zero revenue has to be recouped somehow.

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that it isn't unique, but I'm not trying to imply that drugs should be free and that pharmaceuticals shouldn't make money.

I'm just curious as to whether they're overpricing to make even more profit than is necessary.

For example, if a drug cost $1 to make. Do you charge a reasonable price, like 2 or 3 dollars, or do you gouge people by charging $6, especially if we (the government) are footing the bill for some of their research.

The problem is finding out what it really cost to make a drug, which also includes the cost for running the business.

Anyway, thank you for sharing.
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...isn't germane.
It's the cost of development that is incurred long before that first pill is made.
Sure, the unit cost of that pill is likely quite low. But, a "typical" (industry nonspecific) margin wouldn't begin to cover the R&D, and other SG&A.
You say it's hard to find actual cost. That's true!
But, it's because the hidden burden lies in the 5 prior years of development, legal, registration & approval.
The margins are likely set based on overall, moving average cash flow.
Assigning that to the unit cost of an individual drug would be tricky!
Are many drugs overpriced? Certainly.
But, I'm not sure figuring out what's a fair margin for a new, patented offering is going to be easy.
The bigger issue is on drugs with extended patents (which shouldn't be allowed, and don't get me started) or have expired patents being price manipulated. (Think Shrkeli)

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I'm actually beginning to see the whole crazy picture.

I now honestly believe that too many drug companies are getting screwed, and other companies, with less morals than them, are really what's behind all this crap.

In conclusion, this extended patent and the expired price manipulation doesn't sound right either, although, I really do believe five to seven years to make their cost back is outrageously too short a period of time to do it.

It should be extended to twenty years for ALL drug companies, with the provision that they justify their prices openly and completely, including what all the ACTUAL cost of developing the drug were or are.

Thank you for your reply and the added info.

It helps.
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did you read that post from NNadir (#42).

They think this fact finding mission is fake and making fun of your condition is their round about way of making fun of me.

Please, don't let it bother you, and I'm sorry that they're using you to get a me.
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I appreciate information.

I wrote that FDA approval can be costly and that I thought the companies were burdened with the cost.

None of that was my issue with Genentech. Even their FDA approval for Lucentis was fine by me.

The problem, which was ignored during his reply to me, was that Genentech tried to make off-label injection of Avastin into eyes illegal! They tried to get the government's help to stop an extremely effective treatment for macular degeneration that medical doctors had discovered! Genentech didn't discover that their anti-VEGF cancer drug could be used that way. Yet after they learned it could be used in that way, and they received FDA approval for Lucentis to be injected into eyes for AMD patients (making a minor chemical change from Avastin), they tried to CUT OFF the cheaper off-label use of Avastin!

Thankfully, they dropped that effort after patients and medical doctors raised a fit about it.

I appreciate his knowledge on the subject, but the upset reply just struck me as strange.

Edit:
And here's a link to a NYT story about their effort to restrict its use in eyes. (Ironically, I can't read it since I don't have a NYT subscription, but I'm obviously already familiar with what happened.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/11cnd-eye.html

My last injection was about 9 years ago because I got super lucky with scar tissue that blocked the cracks in Bruch's membrane, which had allowed blood vessel growth into my retina -- called neovascularization, or the "wet form" of macular degeneration.

Edit2:

I started experiencing neovascularization in my other eye in 2003 and I was blind in that eye within months.

The "good eye" started with neovascularization in 2005, but Avastin was available as an off-label treatment by then. I think it was the Palmer Institute in Florida who first discovered Avastin's effectiveness for MD shortly before that happened. Went through nearly monthly injections for about 6 years and kept my eyesight! 20/20 acuity with corrective lenses.

I ALMOST didn't bother returning to the eye doctor in 2005 because I thought, "There's nothing he can do anyway. F--k my life!"

That's the problem with for-profit healthcare in general. It's prone to corruption of its mission. It's a big reason people lose trust in institutions and science. We need national healthcare. Without it, good people on the supply and consumption side are trapped in a bad system.

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Trying to figure out how much they should really cost is getting hard to figure out, because the numbers are so confusing.

There's cost for R&D, FDA approval, clinical trials, marketing and just plain running the business.

There's also the cost of in process drug making and testing for new drugs and old drugs, and all this is mixed together as a whole, and it really is confusing.

Anyway, thanks for letting me rant and also for your post.
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I'm not a stuffed shirt and thank you.

Watching 30 round little yellow heads ROFL is quite relaxing actually.
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and they are in bed with Insurance companies to drive prices and profits, even when they can get by with less.

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Got any proof?
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Last edited Sat Aug 8, 2020, 08:58 PM - Edit history (2)

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seriously, that's really going on and some of what I'm learning is surprising the hell out of me.

Did you know there's actually an actor named Master Bates

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0060983/

Dickens had a character he named that in Oliver Twist, and don't get me started with The Toy:

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thank you.
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this is what I found:

Drug Prices
By Robert Langreth
Updated on February 5, 2019, 7:39 AM PST

Americans spend more on prescription drugs — average costs are about $1,200 per person per year — than anyone else in the world. It’s true that they take a lot of pills. But what really sets the U.S. apart from most other countries is high prices. Cancer drugs in the U.S. routinely cost $10,000 a month. Even prices for old drugs have spiked, as companies have bought up medicines that face no competition and boosted charges. While private insurers and government programs pick up the biggest share of the bill, high drug costs are ultimately passed on to the public through premiums and taxes. More than half of Americans in one poll said that bringing down drug prices should be a top priority of the federal government. President Donald Trump has vowed to do just that.

[SNIP]

The Argument

Pharmaceutical companies argue that they need robust profits to bankroll the development of medical advances and that restricting prices would harm innovation. They highlight the benefits of medicines such as Sovaldi, which has a cure rate superior to treatments that cost nearly as much. Critics point to the industry’s fat profit margins and say companies exaggerate drug-development costs. Doctors and insurance executives worry that many medicines are rapidly becoming unaffordable. Advocates of greater price regulation argue that it needn’t hamper innovation. They say drugmakers could reduce spending on marketing and cite an analysis that found promotional budgets exceed those for research and development at most big companies.

[SNIP]

Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

READ THE REST HERE:

https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/drug-prices#:~:text=Americans%20spend%20more%20on%20prescription%20drugs%20%E2%80%94%20average,in%20the%20U.S.%20routinely%20cost%20%2410%2C000%20a%20month.
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I found this, but does anybody else have a short cut, or know where else to go?

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-information-consumers/fdas-drug-review-process-ensuring-drugs-are-safe-and-effective
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