A comment I made to this 'In the pipeline' post:
I think others have noted that to get a basic idea of how much a drug costs you could just divide total R&D costs by number of new drugs achieved for that R&D spend. If you look at the figure in the recent NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/business/07drug.html?_r=2&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all
They give the total number of new drugs approved per year going back to 1995, and also the total R&D spend per year going back to 1995. Even just eyeballing these figures, about $1 billion per approved drug looks about right (actually a bit on the low side; and its getting even more and more expensive more recently, with R&D spending going up but number of new approved drugs going down significantly from the seeming "glory days" of 1995 to 2000, although biologic drugs aren't included here and could explain some of this). Maybe this is a rough calculation, but it can't be too far off could it?
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