Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
As has been said, though, the revenue from the small proportion of drugs that work has to fund the much larger number that don't. Without patent protection, there would be no new drugs.
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I am not particularly against patent protection. What I meant to say without elaboration is that typically the
majority of the considered molecules of automated scanning are dropped at the preclinical stages.
Most of the remaining molecules go no further than the early phases of the clinical testing of toxicity, therefore only ever tested on a few tens of people. Very few molecules get to the
costly and comparatively lengthy large-scale phase 3. And so it is incorrect to assume the pharmaceuticals are incurring equal risk and expenses on thousands of potentially therapeutic molecules and that a very small number (usually 0.01% of those considered) of extensively tested and marketed drugs fund a much larger number of hardly explored ones.
Also, there's less risk and cost when the research is oriented rather than randomised. In any case however, there is no way the
average cost of any phase or the entire scientific and administrative procedure would amount to a billion dollars. And if the pharmaceutical companies are willing to defend such preposterous number, they might as well publish detailed R&D costs. One would think some transparency goes without question with the benefits of preferential taxation and other incentives.