Pharma R&D Funding

This is propaganda. Spending on research and development at private pharmaceutical companies is dramatically eclipsed by marketing and sales spend.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com&#

New drug development is largely funded by the government already. There are basically 0 new compounds on the market in the last 20 years. Most of the cost for drug development that is pricately funded is just dealing with regulation, not doing R&D. It is always economically more efficient to develop drugs instead of cures.

Drug research is expensive and drug companies aren’t charities

The author conveniently forgets the farmaceutic industry. There, billions need to be invested to find a drug and thoroughly document it's effects and how to make it. The production cost of the drug is only a fraction of the research. This would lead to a very big decrease in the number of new drugs appearing

Most of the basic research is already publicly funded. Where pharmaceutical companies have huge expenses is in running large scale clinical trials necessary to bring drugs to market. In theory that work could be nationalized but in practice I doubt that government bureaucrats without a profit motive would make good choices. More likely they would operate based on political pressure and focus on whichever diseases have the loudest advocates.

I have heard this argument before but it's interesting to see where the money for R&D is actually spent.It's not on these kind of diseases, this kind of work is usually done with public money, grants.Money in big pharma is usually spent in researching weight loss and alternative drugs for common diseases. After all, the return of investment on these types of drugs is much higher.For a big company to make a drug that costs 1 million dollars but only 1000 people in the world

I don't think companies spend as much as we believe in researching drugs. Companies spend most on advertising and incentivizing the doctors to prescribe their medicines. The book: Bad Pharma [1] is an eye opener.The drug "Sovaldi" is making them $2.8ish billion dollars per quarter, that is almost $12 billion a year. I don't believe they spent tens of billions in developing the drug. [2]1: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Pharma-Companies-Mislead-Patients-ebook/dp/B008

It is true that pharma companies take advantage of publicly funded research, but from there to brining a new drug on the market it takes further 10/15 years and 100s million dollars of R&D. A large portion of the cost comes from the fact that most of these projects prove infeasible and are abandoned during development or later during trials.The vast majority of this effort remains unpublished, so I am not sure that the article you cite supports your argument. Most of the research men

Research in pharma is expensive, you can easily spend billions and have nothing to show for it. Where else do you think all that money comes from?

Very little; which is why pharma research is such a problematic industry. We need to seriously rethink the way we develop drugs:1. Research does not get funded unless there is a commercial market for the drug. This leads to overfunding of maintenance treatments of chronic diseases like diabetes, because they are widespread and never really go away. Meanwhile, the system does not incentivize investment in things like antibiotics (because the next wide-spectrum antibiotic that gets developed wi