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Comment by arnoooooo | Hacker News Reader

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arnoooooo·

Most R&D, in the US as elsewhere, make massive use of public funds.

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Which is weird, as that is not factored in the purchase price when buying the product when developed.

yes, you might ask your democratically elected representative about that...

No, that's not true. Private R&D is almost 10x what public R&D is, at least in biotech.

Including the R&D tax credit?

Nope - that's not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_research#Privately_(in...

Private R&D is around 60% - however a large part of that is making minor changes to existing molecules in order to obtain fresh patents.The bigger, riskier research is done by the NIH and other publicly funded bodies. See

https://marianamazzucato.com/entrepreneurial-state/

Also - the quality of privately funded research is much worse, with non-reporting of negative results, data dredging and other dodgy activities being routine - see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma

Your source is all medical research. Not biotech specifically.

Intriguing. I've often speculated about how private sector research compared with public research, especially in the context of the reproducibility crisis since I assumed that a lot of pharma companies knew that some research couldn't be replicated behind closed doors. I wonder what the quality of proprietary / unreleased studies is- do the links you provide take that into account?

It compares badly. Unfortunately too much private research is allowed to be kept secret - but what is known indicates it's of poorer quality - judged by the kind of metrics the Cochrane Institute use.

Goldacre's book (he also has a blog) is well worth reading - describing _many_ ways in which drug companies can cheat.

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