None of that really addresses what I was asking.

What is preventing Canada from taken all that R&D once the US comes up with something awesome?

As for the money, that equation seems to only work if the state is paying the cost of all medicines but considering it isn't the state is still going to be missing a bunch of money.

I'm pretty thoroughly anti-state, but considering pharmaceuticals are motivated to treat and not cure, it might still be better.

Of course, corporate money would still run it all.

That's it. No money in curing conditions. They want people to pay for prescriptions for the rest of their lives.

Name one condition where a pharmaceutical company wouldn't be making a lot of money by finding a cure.

That's an often repeated and parroted meme but it's simply not true.

People are wrong about incentives. If they allll colluded together, sure, they'd like to keep people sick. But the first pharma to get a cure to any disease (worth researching on) banks, banks really frigging big if the disease is serious and common enough.

This is especially true given the expiration dates on patents.

Meanwhile, it's simply not true the pharmaceutical industry hasn't been curing diseases. Just walk down your local pharmacy's OTC isle for evidence. Influenza used to kill millions a year, not anymore.

Unfortunately, even the most promising cures mostly end up in failure. The lucky ones become treatments and very very few actually end up being cures.

Banks really big? How much more could they possibly make from a single shot instead of a lifetime of pills???

.

The answer is actually pretty obvious. Any disease that's rare enough wouldn't be worth the R&D money.

The correct question is... how could a pharmaceutical company NOT bank big on, for example, a cure for AIDS?

It's pretty lol to think cure = magic shot btw.

Anti-virals and antibiotics cure a whole crap ton of diseases. We even have had quite a bit of success curing a lot of people of cancer.

well, rephrase that to cure rather than treatment of existing treatable conditions.

A cure for something like diabetes would net a huge sum even if said pharmaceutical company were already selling insulin.

AIDS is actually the perfect example of something where a cute would cost then money. I guess they could just charge 5 million a pop for the cure.... Except the government would intervene.

How is that?

It very limited what you can earn on a drug once the market gets flooded with generica.

With regards to AIDS the patents for the major drugs are about to expire. There isn't a single company for whom a cure for AIDS wouldn't be a wet dream and a secure blockbuster for the duration of that patent.

The time you can profit from a drug is simply shortened. If I have a drug that can cure AIDS right now (in a patent free world)...how long do you think it takes untill a competing product is on the market?
Would I negotiate huge volume sales before the drug hits the market?

Would people be willing to give me money for future research given my track record of success?

How much money does Bayer make on Aspirin today?

A cure would cost all the other companies money. It would make the company that finds it a fortune especially if that company currently doesn't have a patent on AIDS treatments. What is even better is finding a vaccine. The company that finds that will be printing money for the duration of the patent.

They don't have to charge anywhere close to 5m a pop.

There are about 1 million HIV positives in the US alone. 10,000 a patient gets you 10 billion, even without additional infections. 10k is about the annual cost of antiviral treatment for HIV positives, and that's spread out between drugs produced by different firms (some have gone generic already.)

That sounds like a cure for HIV, with tens of millions infected in the world and millions of new cases a year, even if you cut the prices by 80, even 90%, will easily become the biggest blockbuster in the history of pharmaceutical research.

The argument is that new medicines need to be patent-able to enable recovery of development and approval costs. So we need (and therefore have) patents to make scientific progress possible... by first making it artificially profitable.

But a side effect of the medical patent system is to basically exclude naturally occurring compounds from mainstream medical consideration since they won't get FDA approval, lacking the profit motive to make that happen as natural substances cant be patented.

There are many naturally occurring medicinal compounds in this world that have been used for thousands of years with fantastic safety profiles and great efficacy but you won't hear about them in a hospital. They've got new pills to hawk in those places. There's not enough money to be made exploring the gazillions of naturally occurring substances on the planet that have evolved right along with us - to make money we need brand new fancy substances, and doing that just so happens to cost billions so we need a lot of government control and enforcement to make sure we get our money back.

This has impacted the entire culture of medicine in the US. Nutrition is not taken seriously - the public gaze is kept fixed on the exciting promise of new pharmaceuticals which will help repair their fat, stupid lives. Why are their lives fat and stupid? Don't ask that question... they must just be defective people, right? Pop this pill and sftu!

Patent supporters seem to be supposing that Society is soaring to astonishing new heights of happy healthiness, and the future just looks better and better. Clearly this idea is not grounded in the reality of how modern medicine functions. The reality is that our corporate medicine dominated culture is experiencing a variety of health epidemics at the moment

CDC Grand Rounds: Prescription Drug Overdoses — a U.S. Epidemic

Drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in U.S., data show

If not for laziness there'd be links about Ritalin and 5 yr olds, the steep rise of asthma, adhd, obesity, depression, anxiety rates, etc etc. Modern US medicine is way too expensive and it's not making society healthy even when people do get access. It's going drastically wrong somewhere. Where is it? What's the problem?

A profit motive has been artificially inserted into a stage of health science where one doesn't belong. It's corrupted the whole ****ing thing.