Biologics are not complex to make once you get the cells farting out the medicine
1000$? It costs 80$ here. Insurance covers the 1mg injection completely. Drug prices on the US market are inflated as hell. Also it can be made for 5 bucks but the decades of research and billions poured into said research and testing is what raises the price.
Regardless corporate greed is corporate greed and big pharma is into some really shady stuff. Especially when we get to biologicals.
In a research driven company, research is a basic operational cost. These are all sunk cost paid for by other products. Before the product is introduced all of the research has been paid for.
So let’s take a look at this companies financials.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVO/financials?guccounter=1
Their cost of goods was 36 billion. Out of 232 billion in sales or around a 85% margin.
It says they spent 32 billion dollars research.
They claimed a profit of 104 billion dollars after spending 2x the total research bill on sales/marketing and admin (62 billion) in other research driven industries this would be around 1/2 research budget.
They still made enough money to pay for more than 3 years of research.
In better regulated industry where greed didn’t rule the day. They should be making less than 1/2 the gross income.
This is pure greed based upon people’s suffering
I’ve heard about shortages of the drug. Does anybody know how hard it actually is to make or if they’re manufacturing scarcity as well?
Engineered Biologics involve having to make special cell cultures off engineered specimens so it’s a research forward cost. The actual production is cheap once the cultures are made.
I think if you look deep enough you’ll find public funding in a lot of these projects like with Humira, which was funded by the UK Government and is now absurdly expensive as fuck
