A joint study between Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and Doctors Without Borders found a single shot could be made for just 89 cents.
There’s a lot of mistrust with drug makers at the moment, for good reason and this is a great article on the breakdown of costs. They do have a point about recouping the cost of R&D but maybe they should be more transparent about how long it’ll take them to do so. MBAs are very good at pulling levers to make money, they just don’t think about the human element, which is the most important lever.
First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.
Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.
All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.
There’s a lot of mistrust with drug makers at the moment, for good reason and this is a great article on the breakdown of costs. They do have a point about recouping the cost of R&D but maybe they should be more transparent about how long it’ll take them to do so. MBAs are very good at pulling levers to make money, they just don’t think about the human element, which is the most important lever.
Two points about R&D costs:
First, they aren’t just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There’s a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don’t like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don’t understand how science works.
Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.
All that said, they’ve clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.