Posted by Michael Wonder on 14 Sep 2017
Pharma keeps ignoring its price problem
14 September 2017 - Want to get pharma companies up in arms? Tell them it doesn't cost that much to get a cancer drug to market.
A widely reported paper published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association did exactly that, claiming that the median cost of developing a cancer drug was $648 million for a set of 10 companies.
A recent industry-sponsored study puts the number closer to $3 billion.If the public comes to accept that much cheaper figure, then that is a problem for pharma, which likes to use R&D costs to justify six-figure prices for cancer medicines.
