Great article on drug costs. Interesting points in the artcle:
–“Very often, the original discovery occurs in a university lab with public funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), then licensed to a start-up company partly owned by the university and then to a large company.”
–“There is very little innovation at the big drug firms. Instead, their major creative output is trivial variations of top-selling medications that are already on the market (called “me-too drugs”), to cash in with treatments just different enough to justify new patents.”
–“But the pharmaceutical market is hardly an example of unfettered capitalism, because the companies are totally dependent on government support. In addition to receiving huge tax breaks and government-granted exclusive marketing rights, they are permitted to acquire drugs that resulted from NIH-funded university research.”
–“About half of the major drug companies are European, including the makers of Avastin and Gleevec. But their research arms are often located in the United States, not only because this is their profit center but because they want to be near universities that receive generous NIH funding, in order to develop close relationships with the researchers.”