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Big pharma doesn't need to do R&D because universities do it for them, then license the patents to big pharma..
The same thing happens in Canada as well.
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/should-universities-get-out-patent-business/
edit -- I'm not justifying this ... just clarifying why it happens.
Some Republicans on the committee pushed back on Democratic criticism of pricing, arguing that pricing is what the market will bear. "In capitalism, if you're running an enterprise where you have a fiduciary responsibility to your owners, you try and get as high a price as you can," Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said. "That's what you try and do. You try and make as much profit as you can. That's how free enterprise works. You think Chevrolet sits back and says, 'Gosh, how can we get the price of this Chevrolet down?' No, it's like, 'How high a price can I get and maximize the profit for my shareholder?'" He went on to describe price controls as "socialism lite".
Fuck anyone actually trying to live, I suppose. People dying due to not being able to afford healthcare is what the market has no trouble bearing. All to avoid a little "socialism".
(Whoops I meant to reply to the post, not specifically your comment).
Thank goodness for the Hippocratic origins of healthcare. Wish I could throw his words back at him so he could hear how insane it sounds in the context of healthcare. Just imagine:
You think a doctor sits back and says, 'Gosh, how can we get the price of saving this patient's life down?' No, it's like, 'How high a price can I get and maximize the profit for my shareholder?'"
Vulture capitalism, private equity and the like is the private sector with their priorities mixed up. For it to work properly, a company needs to have a charter and follow it ahead of a profit motive.
In San Diego, big pharma is now heavily investing into AI to do a lot of the chemical compound matching that was traditionally done by people like chemists and biotech employees too.
More money for the company, less paychecks to dispense.
edit links:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/15/1067904/ai-automation-drug-development/
All true, but where is the money for university research coming from?
I mean, some of those research grants come from the same private companies. There's value to them in using that money to train the next generation of scientists, in addition to funding basic research they can use directly.
But, admittedly I don't claim to know how the research dollars are split between private/government/other.
EDIT: Here is a study from UCLA covering 2010-2015 funding that shows about 75% of funding comes from government, and 25% from private industry, charities, or other non-government sources.
The money comes from us, the taxpayers (in Canada anyway), and the students' tuition fees.
Scientists have to be careful accepting money from companies as it could be a conflict of interest.
I worked at a US university for 12 years, I can't speak to what happens in Canada, but here in the US it's definitely a mix. Student tuition is not used for research at all, at least not in any research program I've ever heard of.
In fact, research grants are garnished (usually to the tune of 30% or more) to pay general university expenses, and student instruction is part of that budget.
Thanks for the info. I suspect the same thing happens with Canadian universities. Almost all levels of government help fund them and would probably deduct research grants and patent fees from funding.
Here in California the big research schools make a LOT of money by licensing to private industry. There are often a number of prominent law suits over research patents with the universities and private industry. The universities very much want to keep their patents and make money from them.
Looking at the news for CRISPR tells ya a lot about how modern research works and how universities make money.
Depends on the university., but schools with big flagship research departments like Stanford and the California UC systems make a shit load of money by licensing stuff to private industry. Which is why universities like UC Berkeley are fighting legal battles over CRISPR patents - licensing that stuff is going to make the UC system a fuck load of money.
I swear I read somewhere that even when companies were at their peak of investing money into research, more than 50% of it in the US was still coming from government funding.
That's almost certainly the case. Here's a breakdown of funding at UCLA that shows 25% of research funding coming from non-government sources. The rest is federal, state, or other government.
Oh look, it's literally exactly what everyone expected!
I guess that's what's so off-putting about all of this to me. We can be screaming at the top of our lungs about what's going on for decades and as a society, we'll be fucking gaslit and treated like we're insane for thinking that these giant corporations are slowly turning the screws on us.
Then, surprise surprise, decades later, (always decades later) we find out that the shit that people have been screaming about it for decades, and being jailed or dismisses as cuckoo for saying so, were right all along! Turns out cable companies were planning on adding ads all along. Turns out oil companies knew about climate change all along! Turns out Electric Cars don't solve energy or traffic problems as much as Electric Buses!
It's all fucking lies and gaslighting. Whenever a corporate fucking Suit tells you something is true, you can bet your ass the opposite is true.
This is what really brings my blood to a boil, just by reading your comment. It's the fact that it is too true, because it happens all of the time. There are still so many idiots out there, who'll put their blind faith in so many things, thinking that they're 'protected' or 'safe' or 'secure'. But time after time again, they are exploited and abused in so many ways.
And yet we simply do not learn a single fucking thing. There are few of us who've learned and gotten wiser from the shit we deal with. But damn the idiot pool is still so vast and massive, that it's no wonder this kind of shit still happens. All the while, society believes in karma and invisible deities to come swooping in to save the fucking day one of these days and solve all of our problems.
When, the rich and powerful know too that those ideals are simply lies because they happily continue taking advantage.
And still we yet never learn. Yeah we outnumber them still, but we don't have the smarts or care to deal with them. We just think waving signs and petitions will work.
When I was growing up in the 90's, there were countless over-the-top movie villains, many of which would claim that "People want to be lead, they need it, they demand it." (Just watched Lawnmower Man, and this is nearly a verbatim quote)
I remember always thinking that was so over the top. It still is, to just say it out loud, that is. But these days, fuck, it's so clear that a massive amount of society does just want to be lead by the nose, but the leaders who exploit that (despite being dumb motherfuckers) are somehow smart enough to just not blurt out "You people NEED a King, and that will be ME!" (Well, maybe not Trump, he's said he'll be a dictator on day one...)
I'm just so fucking disappointed in humanity and other humans.
So the reason my company wants me back in the office isn't for networking opportunities. Surely they wouldn't lie to me like that.
Nobody was saying electric cars were better than electric buses ...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-musk-hyperloop-rail-17486877.php
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1495877041585074177
"Musk reportedly told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that the Hyperloop proposal was motivated by “his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system,” which he felt would be too slow, outdated and expensive. “With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled,” Vance wrote."
Literally the guy who is behind spearheading EVs in the US has gone out of his way to kill transit projects.
I don't think they meant to include the guy whose best interest is in people buying electric cars when they made that generalization.
Plenty of people parrot Musk's talking points, and his talking points undermine public transit.
I don't know how you dont include the man who bought and then made the first US EV company flourish. His opinions and statements have deep impact on public discourse, sadly.
That's a psychopath with a personal vendetta against a train that won't profit him, not a person claiming that electric cars are better than electric buses.
Then stop subsidizing them
Exactly.
I don't have a problem with subsidizing them. I have a problem with subsidizing them without requiring the money to go to things with utility like R&D and bringing down production costs. If we did that, I'd be fine with it. The U.S. has a long history of government partnering with private industry on science and engineering. The problem here is that science and engineering weren't being paid for.
I never would have expected this. Especially from an industry where someone raised prices on a life-saving drug by 1500%.
"In 2022, J&J made $17.9 billion in profits, and its CEO received $27.6 million in compensation. That year, the company spent $17.8 billion on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive compensation, while the company spent just $14.6 billion on R&D, the report states. "In other words, the company spent $3.2 billion more enriching executives and stockholders than finding new cures," it concludes.
In 2022, Bristol Myers Squibb also spent $3.2 billion more on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive compensation than R&D—$12.7 billion on executives and stockholders compared with $9.5 billion on R&D. That year, the company made $6.3 billion in profits, and its former CEO made $41.4 million in compensation."
It's pretty clear where these corporations' priorities lie. I wonder how much of their R&D was funded by US taxpayers.
I'm not going to defend the excess bonuses and buybacks etc, but it's difficult to say that they could have easily put that money into more cures.
You can't just throw excess money at things and suddenly it works out, there's diminishing returns and in the end you can just be throwing money into the incinerator vs doing any good.
The better option would be ditch the crazy bonuses and pay etc. and lower the god damn prices. The prices on some of these things are criminal.
They are rare diseases that dosen't get a buck spent on. They could start on those ones.
The reason those don't have money spent on them is because they'll never be profitable, or have million+ dollar treatment costs because so few people have them.
They'd need to be altruistic to spend money on those, or face huge backlash from the costs if successful.
If they lowered prices that made these insane profits, they'd get good press and help millions of people, instead of help thousands and bad press.
You can't just throw excess money at things and suddenly it works out, there's diminishing returns and in the end you can just be throwing money into the incinerator vs doing any good.
How could this ever be worse than throwing the money into the incinerator that is shareholders? At least the money spent on R&D won't be used by rich assholes to manipulate politics and public opinion.
It could actually slow research down.
Bringing more researches onto the same project doesn't always make it faster. It's the whole 9 woman can't have a baby in 1 month problem. Some things can't be sped up with more people or money.
And if you have too many projects going, things start to get mismanaged.
Bureaucracy breeds inefficiency
Edit: also I don't think you read my OP as I said they should lower prices instead of all the nonsense.
It could also speed research up. It is incredibly unlikely that the current amount of money spent is exactly the best amount possible.
And even if research were to somehow slow down compared to now, the world would still be a better place, since fewer rich assholes would have undue influence.
Do you even understand what I'm saying?
The world isn't a better place if research slows down because they charge you $7100 but it's $650 elsewhere.
Lower the god damn prices.
Bam there's fewer rich assholes now and millions of individuals are better off.
Do you understand what I'm saying? Don't just lower prices, also increase investments in R&D. We are not at peak R&D efficiency, so don't ignore it completely.
If they truly believed they could spend more money and get more out of it, they would be, because that would give them billions more in bonuses.
These multi billion dollar companies run efficiently until they don't because they expanded too much too fast and the bureaucracy and size becomes the problem.
Why do you think that they can get more money with more efficient R&D? Sometimes less efficient solutions result in more money.
These pharma CEO, and most C-Suite officers in general make waaaay too much. That said, a good chunk of this R&D budget might be actually be obscured in acquisition and licensing expenses. It's pretty common for companies to get so damn big that they know longer to know how to innovate or execute efficiently anymore. I feel like Adobe and Autodesk are good examples of this in type of thing in the software space. All they do is buy and license crap.
A lot of these pharma companies license stuff from the Stanfords and Cals of the world. Moreover, those schools are pretty aggressive about protecting their licenses because they make a shit load of money off of that stuff.