How much can you make on a successful cancer drug? Billions

[Editor’s note: Dr. Jamie Wells, MD, FAAP, is a Board-Certified physician and the Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health.]

The cancer drug business is quite a profitable one. A “high risk, high reward” proposition has been the narrative for those in research and development (R&D).

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What’s the reality? The truth is drug development, like most medical innovations, is complex, additionally bound to patent and regulatory approval processes, requires labor and overhead costs, perpetuates winners and losers when it comes to levels of demand.

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[A] study design involved collecting data on ten companies with no drugs on the US market that received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). […] They concluded: “The cost to develop a cancer drug is $640 million, a figure significantly lower than prior estimates…With a median of 4.0 years (range 0.8-8.8 years) since approval, the total revenue from sales of these 10 drugs since approval was $67.0 billion compared with total R&D spending of $7.2 billion”

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“Too many patients are being priced out of the medicines they need. While FDA doesn’t have a direct role in drug pricing, we can take steps to help address this problem by facilitating increased competition in the market for prescription drugs through the approval of lower-cost, generic medicines,” [said FDA head Scott Gottlieb]

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Are Cancer Drugs Cheaper To Make Than Previously Thought? New Study Claims So.