Wolfgang Link, researcher at the Center for Research in Biomedicine (CBMR), at the University of Algarve, has just published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, a comment that aims to discuss and question the high price paid by taxpayers for current medicines on the market.
Reflecting on the fact that, in recent decades, we have witnessed a paradigm shift - which means that most new drugs effectively depend on greater knowledge and understanding of the disease - only achieved through years of basic research ( financed, most of the time, by the State and the public sector), the researcher raises questions about the fact that the private sector, namely companies, later take advantage of these investigations and the knowledge produced by them, to develop new drugs with high profit margins.
Wolfgang Link clarifies that, to minimize risks, private companies make a kind of outsourcing from the riskiest phases of the development of new drugs, leaving them to universities or small biotechnology companies, to later take advantage of the knowledge produced by them to design medicines with minor changes, sold to the State at much higher prices. high.
Reflecting on how the development of new drugs has allowed increasingly targeted treatments and more personalized approaches, the researcher assumes that the risk/reward relationship with regard to pharmaceutical innovation is highly unbalanced when comparing the public sector with the sector private.
In fact, from the article it seems possible to suggest that taxpayers are paying twice for drugs: first through public funding of scientific research, and later to gain access to these drugs at higher prices than that you would expect.
According to the researcher, “the current system for the development of new drugs is inefficient and will lead us, in the future, to a scenario in which access to innovative therapies will be a privilege only for the richest”.
Starting from the premise that knowledge is priceless, Wolfgang Link, a researcher at the University of Algarve who, in this comment had the consultancy of the renowned North American economist Dean Baker, defends, then, an investment by the State in the area of development of new drugs, thus allowing for a greater balance in the price of drugs, and even pointing out that free of charge is one of the ways forward for the new generation of drugs.
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