How many billions in R&D did Roche and Gilead spend on other drugs that never made to market?
I don't know if there is a good source of that information. But, we can guess. Gilead Sciences had a $86M IPO warchest in 1992. Four years later, Tamiflu was patented along with several other products. Lets just guess on the large side that Tamiflu development required half of thier money. So, $43M to get it patented. At that point Roche bought the rights. I don't know what Roche paid for FDA approval for that drug. But I have dealt with Roche for other products and Roche told me that they typically pay $7M to $10M for each approval. Probably since Tamiflu is a big drug, they paid more for more research. Until someone links real information, I'll just guess $20M. Note: the federal goverment picks up about half of the expenses, so lets add on another $20M. That gives us $43M + $20M + $20M = $83M as a very rough guess. If anyone has concrete numbers, I'll gladly update.
Now, there may have been other expenses. The goverment may have given Gilead grant money to help develop it. The government was also planning to spend $1B to stockpile it (does anyone here know how much was actually spent?). Not coincidently, a nameless goverment employee at the time received tens of millions of dollars in his stock share increase from this announcement. I think the "Tamiflu was expensive to develop" argument is a bit overused. They already got a ~15x return on the non-government expenses.
My bias in case you are wondering: I develop medical tests for a living and my wife works at a well-known pharmaceutical company.
I was about to post the same thing. You must be able to itemize, you must have massive expenses that aren't covered by insurance, and the insurance premiums aren't usually deductable in this category.
Yeah, but what about all the drugs they push for diseases they are not approved for?
And how about all the government funded R&D that the drug companies get from the taxpayers?
Or how about how they have a loophole in the law that lets them double the patent?
Typical cost to bring a new drug to market is half a billion. No that's not with marketing.
hsa ftw.
How many billions in R&D did Roche and Gilead spend on other drugs that never made to market?
In 1999, PhRMA testified that the average cost of drug development was $0.5 billion, and that only 1 in 5,000 compounds are successful.
Bristol-Myers Squibb now claims that it has spent more than $1
billion to develop Taxol, a drug it did not invent.
MSF Working Group on R&D, 2000
I thought it was 5 billion to bring a new drug to market
Roche generally doesn't do much R&D. They buy companies that have already done the R&D. Roche also spends billions on ads to promote their products. So, Roche spends billions, but NOT on research.
You fail to see the scope of things. $8.7 is just pennies to Roche (even if you really meant $8.7B, that is still pennies).According to their accounts Roche spent $8.7 on R&D in 2008...
~90% of that was on pharmaceuticals.
Fail.