Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Those medicines would not exist if drug companies did not invest billions in research, most of which doesn't work out to anything. Unless companies can make a reasonable return on investment from those few drugs that do work, the research won't happen at all.
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But is that corporate infrastructure even necessary for the production of new drugs? Much of the basic research occurs at publicly funded institutions such as Universities. Basic research is hard to justify to a bottom-line conscious corporation, so the public funds it. Then Big Pharma swoops in, appropriates the products of publicly funded research, and figures out ways to monetize it. I'm not saying that they contribute nothing to the research, but that the keystone they contribute is added to a broad foundation of publicly funded research. That being said, it is not all clear that a lack of IP would mean that there would be an insufficient return on investment: a large amount of money is made simply by being first in the market.
Luqman