I know most people here will agree that software patents do more harm than good, but is there actual data to show that patents are good for other industries?
It seems that the development of drugs is such an incredibly expensive investment that you need to grant a limited monopoly to the developer so that he can recoup on it.
Average cost to bring a new drug to market is around $1.5 billion
Drug production is (to oversimplify, please correct) to blindly create millions of combinations, test the successful-looking versions on rats, cats and people, and produce billions of the drug. I wonder how the money is split between those tasks.
The biggest expense is typically human clinical trial where you're looking at a figure in the high hundreds of millions.