More on Pfizer and big pharma.The pharma companies argue they...

More on Pfizer and big pharma.

The pharma companies argue they have to bear the risk of developing experimental drugs that never make it to market. For example, the average cost of a new cancer drug has been estimated at $648 billion. The $2.6 billion figure cited from PHRMA above is actually a “risk weighted” estimate which “includes the cost of many failures”. If a pharma company invents 10 drugs costing $260 million each, but only one gets approved, then it has cost $2.6 billion overall to produce one it can sell.


Except that isn’t what happens. The reality is that major pharma companies only “invent” a handful of the drugs they patent and sell. In 2019, PHRMA’s member companies only spent $13 billion on preclinical research – most of their R&D spending goes on later stage development trials, after drugs have been discovered. An analysis of two Big Pharma giants shows that Pfizer only developed 10 out of 44 best-selling drugs “in house” (23%) – and Johnson & Johnson only developed 2 out of 18 (11%). The “innovation” largely happens in university and government labs, or in those of smaller research companies.

https://corporatewatch.org/five-ways-big-pharma-makes-so-much-money/