TIL that cancer drug Revlimid is one of the bestselling products of all time. It cost nearly $1,000 per pill, even though that same pill cost just 25 cents to make

Even if we go by 0 subsidies as an argument, anything past around the 800 thousandth pill sold has already paid for itself and is now pure profit.

The argument deserves to burn alongside whoever uses it to extort people for life saving care.

Also most pharma research is done by public universities that private pharma companies then buy the rights to.

Brave to assume that only one country gives a subsidy.
Australia has the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme that does the same thing.

Let's-a go!

I'm on board with Wario flat-out eating the next one.

Yah, bestselling is wrong.
Most profitable would be the term.

Disgusting.

Pharma companies could also be considered government and worker owned and pay for the cost with taxpayer money...oh wait, we already subsidize this stuff with our taxes.

How much do executive payouts, lobbying, and marketing costs take out from those profit margins?

Read the article. The company wasn't the one to discover it. They bought it for pennies then put in minimal research to further develop it, but only based on the research of another doctor who wasn't with the company. Then they put in another round of research to develop it once more only to cheat the patent law, not to improve the drug efficacy. In the end they spent far less than the normal amount to develop what normally justifies the cost. Then, the price hikes were independent of development pushes and were tied only to quarterly profit demands.

This only has legs if they’re developed without being largely government funded, which to my understanding isn’t true for a lot of drugs.

I think they'd justify that by saying they need to ensure the funds they need for future research on other breakthrough treatments. This is not entirely baseless, but just another nail in the coffin for why medical research shouldn't be funded primarily through capitalist methods.

A condition of public funding should be that aggregate internal rate of return, exclusive of executive team remuneration, should be published and capped, verified by independent audit.

The patent eventually expires and then the generics come out more cheaply.

There's a generic for Revlimid out now, in fact.

Don't worry, the government subsidies a huge portion of that research already.

You also arent funding the development of the drug that worked, but also the dozen that didnt.

Not saying they arent predatory, just that the math of "The pill only costs $0.25" is a massive oversimplification.

It's a public good. The company should be owned by the government and workers, ergo they don't need to make a profit.

Have you considered just not having cancer instead?

My sister in law in Indonesia has (had? Not sure) stage four cancer and is only alive over the last 4 years because the family are having to pay for the expensive drug. I can't remember the name, but it was the on the UKs NHS refused to use because of the cost.

The medication matches the household income. That's two fully grown adults and one working child.

I know the NHS here is always talked about as being in trouble, but in still glad we have it.

If you haven't already, you should be looking at generic dasatinib, released more than a year ago. It'll be a fraction of the cost.

as far as I know they heavily subsidize the cost especially if you don't have insurance

Oh yeah love that coupon. They approve the first few months to show you it will work and then jack up the price

The price of biologics kills me. I know it costs about $20 dollars for a month of GLP-1 agonists, because I've made similar peptides myself in grad school. Something like a Solid Phase Peptide Synthesizer runs $10-250K, but the cost to synthesize a 40 amino acid linear peptide at industrial scale is like...$0.30 USD per milligram. Shorter chain peptides are even cheaper. A 15AA linear peptide can be as low as $0.01/mg.

There are of course other expenses, especially labor, facilities, certification, and waste disposal, but these companies are still easily making 40-50% profit margins on biologics. Compare this to non-biologics pharmaceutical profit margins around 15-25%, or for other industry comparisons, grocery stores around 1-3%, restaurants 3-10%, and software at 15-20%.

We should gamify it. We should socialize the medicine, so everyone can afford it - I mean, come on- but then:

If you work in a lab which creates a life saving drug - you get a ticker tape parade through every fucking city in the USA - you get a bronze statue in the "park of medical heroes." Everyone knows you as "the man who fucking cured HSHBRHF variant 4x."

their prices do decrease steeply once the patient terminates.

DAE read this as patient‽

Cures don’t come with a subscription model.

There is no such thing as "cancer" there are shit tons of types of cancers caused by shit tons of things.

Or if some not comically evil people would hold power

Really depends on what is in the pill and what happens if you get the formula wrong.

Most of them would be making different medications.

probably harder to do then making simple medication like meth, tylenol. things like bioliogics, certain immunosuppressants need a technical know how, chemicals reagents,,,etc, need to know the chemistry behind alot of them. biologics need some organism like yeast or bacteria to make.