this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Intellectual property is a scam. A commonly heard defense of intellectual property is that it is needed for companies to fund their R&D. However pharmaceutical companies typically spent a lot more money on marketing & sales than they do on R&D. Big Pharma spending money on marketing and sales is harmful to our health. Apparently it's a lot more lucrative to get people drugged up on painkillers or whatever than to discover new medicine. If we didn't have intellectual property then we would have competition resulting in the lowest possible medicine prices. Companies would have no money for marketing so medicine would be judged on their actual properties, only the best would be given to patients, not the best marketed, but best health-wise. Companies would have no money for R&D either, but the government could fund R&D We shouldn't blame the players, we created a system that produces these bad actors. Let's change the system so that these bad actors couldn't exist. Intellectual property is a international problem, join the pirate party of your country and let's make it happen!
There is some level of R&D they do to productize it, manufacturability and scaling. And running drug safety trials cannot be cheap, especially the liability insurance.
That all said, I think it's criminal that the university labs pay so little. PhD students barely make over $40k, set by the NIH. Not adjusted for CoL either.
I think I have more of an issue with the for-profit nature of pharma companies. Shareholders shouldn't be involved in medicine.
I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
The woman who got the nobel prize for the mRNA research that led to the Pfizer vaccine did a lot of it while employed at Pennsylvania University before they fired her because they didn't see the research leading to making them money. Then she moved on to Biontech where she continued the research.
I'm not sure how much was done at the university but it was probably not insignificant and then biontech got lucky and snapped it up for basically free.
I'm always curious about the actual numbers. Here's their R&D budget by year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267810/expenditure-on-research-and-development-at-pfizer-since-2006/
And their overall revenue:
https://www.pfizer.com/sites/default/files/investors/financial_reports/annual_reports/2022/performance/
In 2020, their revenue was about $40B on $8.5B in R&D cost. They had a huge revenue increase the last few years, with 2022 being $100B, but R&D only increased to about $11B.
So they do have R&D, but it's not that big compared to the money they're bringing in. Their net income has increased substantially, as well.
Thank you for finding the numbers
In the bio industries R&D has almost exclusively become just the D. We like to think that there are a bunch of scientists doing lifelong, painstaking research to develop new drugs or treatments within the labs at Pfizer, Merk, Lilly, or whatever, but a significant portion of the research is done at small independent or school funded labs.
Once one of those small labs creates a decent treatment that will likely pass government testing, a large corp will buy it and say "We just made this brand new thing!". Really though, their R&D budget is spent on acquisition, production, supply chain development, and marketing.
Working in R&D in a few different positions in my career and this is absolutely the case. Hell some of them you could equate to white label SaaS products. Using research from universities putting it in a neat package and selling it.
The corporate bio industry is so fucked up I can't even begin to describe it. I tell my friends and family stories, but I sound like an insane person to them. The scale at which money is thrown around is just too large for most people to imagine.
Like this: imagine a worker that makes less than $35k per year processes, and is soley responsible for $20M in products, per month. Product that people all around the world not only use, but ingest. Now imagine that that one worker is the only one in the world who knows how that product is processed. That's how bio manufacturers work.
In addition to that, I've heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can't be made.
Who wants unpaid internships!
AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just ~~bribed~~ sponsored Right People