undefined | Better HN

0 pointsaantix7y ago0 comments

Food production is predictable. Finding a safe, effective treatment for Alzheimer’s is not.

If you want thin margins, maybe government research wing can take its findings from idea to market (imagine waiting on a cure and that’s your only hope?)

But you can’t force a private company to operate on low margins by way of capping prices, you’ll kill them. You can’t taje away their ability to control their risks (cash flow). Drug R&D already has a huge failure rate and now the company can only take a 5% profit on the slight chance they’ve found something effective?

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

dv_dt7y ago· 2 in thread

If you look at the paper, private drug discovery is creating drugs at a declining rate. I would suggest this is because those private efforts are much less research than development, and it's actually the public system that drives much fundamental research. And the drugs to market rate is in serious decline because of a the widespread application of increasingly austure public funding budgets for medical research causing an early pipeline bottleneck.

aantixOP7y ago

When you dump a link to a 60 page pdf and you’re going to reference it, please list the page number and/graph you’re referring to. I don’t want to guess.

dv_dt7y ago

Sorry, Fig 1, page 15 is the data on drugs discovered per billion. Table 1, pg 18 shows some sample breakdowns of drug investments broken down between basic research and commercial development.

I don't necessarily subscribe to everything in that report, but I do think that modeling drug development in terms of a simple risk-reward model for the private drug industry needs further thought.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse