It's the develop a drug part of your statement that goes beyond what this project supplies.

Developing a drug is not easy, it takes time and research and, most importantly, money. Lots of money.

I'm not suggesting that pharmaceutical companies are evil or benevolent, but there would be zero drugs available if they couldn't recover their costs and make a little profit doing so.

Hello dude s,

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Tedi

Nice read it and follow the answers. It's credibility ! thank you !

Hi dude_s,

I agree that the whole system is a bit warped, but that's life, I suppose.

Before giving a drug to patients, three different phases of clinical trials have to be performed to confirm that the drug is both safe (or at least safe enough) and also effective at its intended purpose (for large numbers of people). Clinical trials cost many millions of dollars. In fact, I believe they generally cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In general, no company is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to test a potential drug in clinical trials unless they have the ability to recoup their investment and try to make some profit. If that was their business practice, that company would go bankrupt. They actually need to make some profit off of it, just to help pay for the costs of the research, development, and clinical trials for the other potential drugs that ended up failing the clinical trial process. Most drugs that enter clinical trials end up failing those tests in humans. If I remember correctly, less than 5% of potential drugs actually pass the clinical trials.

Luckily, the system is starting to get a bit better for some diseases. See the private-public partnership against malaria, which is called MMV (Medicines for Malaria Venture). This is especially needed for malaria research, since there is almost no profit to be gained by curing malaria patients (i.e., the entire global market for all malaria drugs is only a couple hundred million dollars/year). Malaria is also an example of a disease that we can actually cure, instead of just "treating" it. Of course, there's still the problem that malaria parasites eventually evolve resistance to any of the drugs that have been used against it, which is why the world needs a lot more malaria research to be performed on a fairly constant basis.

Another point to remember is that patents on drugs have a limited lifetime. After the patent expires, then other companies can mass produce and distribute generic, much cheaper versions of the drug. It's not a perfect solution, but at least it helps improve the situation eventually.

Best wishes,
Alex L. Perryman, Ph.D.