alt Hacker NewsNo matter what drugmakers spend money on, you hear complaints:
- Marketing, to learn what / whom / how to sell: “They spend more on TV ads than R&D!”
- Basic R&D: “Look at all the conflicts of interest in this academic research!”
- Commercial R&D: “They’re just looking for ways to extend the patent lifetime of drugs that only exist because of government-funded basic R&D!”
- Back to the shareholders (mostly pensions and retirement accounts): “Billions of stock buybacks for Wall Street!”
What should the pharmaceutical companies with billions coming in from GLP-1’s be spending their money on?
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Both opinions can be true, drugmakers should still spend money on R&D, and consumers should hold academic research with significant financial ties to interested sponsors to a higher standard of scrutiny.
Criticism does not have to mean preventing work, we can be critical especially of work that we find important.
You may be right that they are in a bind wrt public opinion. But that is not a defence against any specific criticism. What is your opinion on the conflict of interest mentioned above?
I'm inclined to agree with your point, but it seems like there's an obvious thing they could do that I think people wouldn't complain about: Reduce their prices. Of course that would just look like not getting so many billions from GLP-1 drugs, rather than like any specific action one could complain about.
(If anyone reading this feels inclined to say something like "But how would that benefit them?" -- well, if you restrict consideration to things they could do that benefit them, then it no longer seems so unreasonable if all their options look bad to the critically-minded. Maybe they should be doing things that benefit the rest of the world more and themselves less.)
One thing they are spending them on is tons of new research. Lilly is spinning up massive facilities in Indiana, of all places. I know some absolutely fantastic researchers at Indiana University but I had never thought of it as a biotech hub before.
Much like the conspiracy that pharma companies are uninterested in curing diseases, the complaints aren't based on data or facts.
I'll offer cystic fibrosis as an example. Trikafta may as well be a miracle drug. And CRISPR-based gene editing and replacements are being researched that could be an outright cure, as opposed to a 90% cure.
What’s the concern here? Too much justice? Holding powerful institutes to account frequently seems like a good thing to me.