Re:good idea (Score 1)

A good portion of medical research is done at colleges/universities around the world. Where students (some paid others not) do a significant portion of the research. Furthermore when a patent runs out on a drug there are usually knock off brands released immediately. If the production cost was so high then how do these companies make the same drugs for less and sell them to the consumer for less? Well it is true that the true cost of producing the physical pill or injection that administers a drug is relatively low, this is entirely counter-acted by the incredibly high cost of researching (a process which can run anywhere from 2 to 10 years with very low yields), testing (which usually takes about 10-15 years), and finally getting approval (which takes about 2 years) for a new drug. Of any given set of 5000 drugs entering preclinical testing, on average only 5 progress to human testing, making biotech one of the high risk and costly markets in existance today. The average cost of researching and developing a new drug is about $500 million, with most drugs never recouping their initial cost. All in all, the United States biotech industry spent $10 billion in the year in 2000 on research, with that number rising rapidly over the course of the last decade. I would like to see how the public sector could provide this amount of funding and manpower for research.