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Comment by woofyman | Hacker News Reader

$60,000 usd a year list price.

To play the devil's advocate, there are 30,000 people in the US with Huntington's [0]. If all of them paid full price for the drug that comes out to 1.8B. Bringing a drug to market costs 2.5B [1]. In order to encourage drug development for rare diseases, there needs to be some financial reward. Often more than half of a drug's patent is gone by the time that the drug is approved.

0. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/159552.php

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cost-to-develop-n...

Their potential market is worldwide, and getting your R&D money back in a year or so is extremely good.

I'm pretty sure the $2.5 billion/drug includes R&D "wasted" on failed drugs too. The industry gets 20-30 new drugs approved per year, and spends around $60 billion per year developing them. I mention this because one could easily see that figure and think that they'd need to make, say, $25 billion just to break even after paying for all the drugs that never made it out of development.

Drug developers have a strong incentive to overstate what they spent developing a drug. Since they are the source of these numbers, I suspect they are inflated. If you were to take all of the drugs a company developed during some time period and add up their reported development costs the total would likely far exceed the companies total expenditure.

That's a strong claim that you could probably support with data with little effort, but as it stands, it's conjecture.

I do agree with your analysis, but it's a weak argument to incentive.

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