General Discussion

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.