That would be an incredible rate of success, depending on what 'first level' means. If you mean "reached human clinical trials", maybe, but dunno.
> It also seems that academia is not any better than pharmaceuticals at either developing the first step or pushing something to the end.
"it also seems" lacks rigour, but let that pass for now.
If academia develops 85% of the drugs that are released (I'll try to find a source for that, it's from memory) then the vast majority of failure costs (85% of them) are soaked up by the taxpayer. The few that are bought up by the drugs companies, are then sold privately. Very profitable.
"According to BBC News, in 2013 pharmaceutical companies enjoyed higher average profit margins than carmakers, oil and gas companies and media companies. Only banks had a profit margin comparable to Big Pharma, but Pfizer’s 42% profit margin blew every other company out of the water, prompting even a member of its own industry to say, “I wouldn’t be able to justify [those types of margins].”
In 2013, five pharmaceutical companies exceeded 20% profit margins: Pfizer, Hoffman-LaRoche, AbbVie, GSK and Eli Lilly."
from https://www.andruswagstaff.com/blog/big-pharma-has-higher-pr...
It is misleading to say that the pharma industry is hugely profitable because 5 companies have high profit margins. There are thousands of pharma companies. Most will never make a profit -- they just do research. Most of these fail, the ones that succeed sell their drugs to those big pharma companies bc they can't commercialize them on their own.
[0] https://troutaccess.com/index.php/snippets/details/hash/1720...
What about all the companies that no longer exist because their drug failed and they went bankrupt?
It's disingenuous to limit your analysis of profit to the most successful companies.
Not remotely surprised, because you're misrepresenting my quote. That's not what it said. Read it again.
Obviously rats aren't people, but a company obvious be edits when a molecule is discovered, synthesis optimized, and method of action/LD50 is paid for by the public before every cent of profits are privatized
Even if they don't market it, they own something tthat the public paid for
If the study/compound structure has been made public in some form, I think the public has gotten its fair share. The process that will take the compound from works-in-mice to works-in-people is quite difficult and risky. Pharma companies are very good at administering those things and (usually but unfortunately not always, hello Novartis) run those programs in a manner that ensures safety as much as possible down the line.
The Pharma company will spend its billion (roughly the cost per approved drug these days) and will recover many more times that if successful, but eventually the compound will become generic, and all of us will be able to get it for cheap.
I think there are many many problems with pharma, and I say this as someone who is trying to start a biotech. But the fundamental process above doesn't strike me as grossly out of line, it's playing to each players strengths. The reforms I would make would be around some of the pricing excesses, some of the patent/generics loophole abuses, and to find ways to address areas that are hard to make work financially in a private setting (antibiotics for example) through some sort of public/private partnership/prize system.