F
Fred Bloggs
Guest
Taken together, it appears that the US biotech industry has been the main driver of innovative drugs over the past ten years. I don\'t want to belittle the follow-on compounds, because they are useful. (As pointed out here before, it\'s hard for one of those compounds to be successful unless it really represents some sort of improvement over what\'s already available). At the same time, though, we can\'t run the whole industry by making better and better versions of what we already know.
And the contributions of universities - especially those in the US - has been strong, too. While university-derived drugs are a minority, they tend to be more innovative, probably because of their origins in basic research. There\'s no academic magic involved: very few, if any, universities try deliberately to run a profitable drug-discovery business - and if any start to, I confidently predict that we\'ll see more follow-on drugs from them as well..
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-country
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-numbers
Biotech originated drugs don\'t run cheap. Gilead paid $11Bn for the HepC antiviral.
Anyway, this is how we get wonderful stories like this:
https://news.yahoo.com/man-terminal-cancer-cured-drug-224917350.html
And the contributions of universities - especially those in the US - has been strong, too. While university-derived drugs are a minority, they tend to be more innovative, probably because of their origins in basic research. There\'s no academic magic involved: very few, if any, universities try deliberately to run a profitable drug-discovery business - and if any start to, I confidently predict that we\'ll see more follow-on drugs from them as well..
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-country
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-numbers
Biotech originated drugs don\'t run cheap. Gilead paid $11Bn for the HepC antiviral.
Anyway, this is how we get wonderful stories like this:
https://news.yahoo.com/man-terminal-cancer-cured-drug-224917350.html