Competition and collaboration to cut the price of medicines | Letters

Adam Barak of PPi Healthcare Consulting, Marie-Paule Kieny of the Medicine Patents Pool and Peter Butts respond to our briefing on the cost of drugs

The large graphic accompanying your article (The cost of drugs, 9 April) has a major omission, one of the most important factors affecting medicine pricing and affordability. (There are others involving “international reference pricing” and “parallel trade” but that’s a separate debate.)

It charts the 13 years of rigorous clinical development required by regulators to ensure new drugs achieving regulatory approval are safe and effective. As the article states, all this R&D costs an absolute fortune.

Continue reading... April 11, 2018 at 10:29PM