They will get cheaper with time as the techniques become commodities.
Except the cost of many drugs continues to go up, even as they're commercially available and R&D has been recouped (I also realize that R&D may be a bucket across multiple drugs, not just a 1:1 correlation, but nonetheless).
We should also invest in lowering the costs of drug design & trialing so we can lower the risk premium and startup cost.
We already lower the costs of a lot of drug design by doing (some of) it at public universities.
Except the cost of many drugs continues to go up, even as they're commercially available and R&D has been recouped
A successful drug doesn't have to recoup its own R&D costs, it also has to recoup the costs of all the drugs that failed to make it to approval. It's not any different than VC investing. Just because one company in a portfolio returned 10x ROI, doesn't mean you can be like "alright guys, you made back all your money, now turn yourself into a non-profit".
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Except the cost of many drugs continues to go up, even as they're commercially available and R&D has been recouped (I also realize that R&D may be a bucket across multiple drugs, not just a 1:1 correlation, but nonetheless).
We already lower the costs of a lot of drug design by doing (some of) it at public universities.
Yes, it is a bucket. I would like your examples though.
Yes, we should do this more. Public funding is very rarely sufficient to go through the whole development -> market process.
A successful drug doesn't have to recoup its own R&D costs, it also has to recoup the costs of all the drugs that failed to make it to approval. It's not any different than VC investing. Just because one company in a portfolio returned 10x ROI, doesn't mean you can be like "alright guys, you made back all your money, now turn yourself into a non-profit".