Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

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The author of the article you posted, Donald Light, has done a pretty poor job of supporting the numbers he has come up with.

If you want to see what drugs cost to develop, just ask the scientists who develop them: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/09/getting_drug...

His numbers don't even pass the sniff test. If you want to find out how much it costs to develop a new drug, there is nothing stopping you from calling a CRO and asking how much they charge for phase III trials (they are all in competition, so they'll freely give you a quote).

The average cost for a phase III trial is approximately $15,000/pt/yr. 1000 patients is a pretty average size trial, so now you are at $15M for one trial and the FDA requires at least two phase III trials.

And that's just the cost of phase III trials which doesn't include: phase I, phase II, manufacturing, regulatory costs, etc. Donald Light's claim that drugs cost $45M to develop is laughable and the could only come from someone with no understanding of drug development.

15000 USD/pt/yr seems to be a cost of phase 3 drug trial in a wealthy (western) nation. there has been a boom in conducting human trials across developing nations , through private contractors. A search for 'drug trials in developing nations' returns millions of links , including reputable sources like bbc and pbs. I will let you pick the best ones :) per capita income in india is 12000 usd/yr. there is no way, a drug firm will spend 15k usd in a place like that to perform human trials.Do remember that 12000 usd is the average income. the rural poor are some of the poorest in that world. you can safely assume that the cost of a drug trial in countries like india is much much lower. Indian poor have also been a test bed for human clinical trials. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20136654

Drug companies use poor as guinea pigs , marking up the price for wealthy nations and worst of all , prevent life saving care for billions of people. some on whom the drugs were tested on. So, there is more than one reason this victory is sweet for the developing nations.

p.s sorry about the multiple edits..

I am somewhat confused by the term "article you posted" in your comment. I had believed that I had posted a variety of different articles from several different sources, one of which was written by Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and presumably someone who knows how much a drug costs to develop.

The article I was referring to was the BJM article.

Oh yes, I know all about Marcia Angell. She has been rallying against the pharma industry for over a decade. The link I posted also goes into some of the outrageous things she has said that are completely unsupportable.

Here is another article talking about Marcia:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/12/14/marcia-...

Does pharma do bad things? Yes! But claiming there is a pharma conspiracy to drive down "target" cholesterol levels so they can sell more drugs is laughable. It ignores all the scientific evidence (most of it NOT from pharma companies), much of it published in her the journal she works for.

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