Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-116.68.122.163-20180628145149/@comment-28169398-20180629200138

SM Racer wrote: Of course we've made compromises, that's the balancing act. I've got a project I love limping along mostly grant funded, instead of going full speed on equity funding.

There are companies that get thoroughly corrupted by the profit motive and lose their mission (I'm looking at your, Purdue Pharma), but I don't think that's very common. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/super-resistant-superbugs/

Particularly:

"Dr. William Schaffner, head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, says it may be hard to persuade doctors to be tougher with patients who want antibiotics: "It's easier to say than it is to do -- particularly when for a long time, you really thought that there would be a new antibiotic down the pike, and if this one doesn't work, we'll just use the next one."

But Schaffner says the next antibiotic may not be just down the pike. A majority of the major pharmaceutical companies are cutting back on antibiotic research or withdrawing altogether.

"For example, in the year 2002, something like 400 new pharmaceutical agents were licensed by the FDA," says Schaffner. "In that year, there were no genuinely new antibiotics among them. I mean, that's a striking thing. Last year, there were one or two." Why is this happening? Well, one reason is that antibiotics are usually taken for just about two weeks, and therefore are not nearly as profitable as drugs people take for years, like Lipitor for cholesterol or Viagra.

"If I were the CEO of a pharmaceutical firm, I would point out that our research is benefiting the health of the public," says Schaffner. "A lipid-lowering drug reduces heart attacks. But how can I responsibly invest my shareholders' money -- $900 million to create a new antibiotic? … Those are the estimates. That's not fair to the shareholders."

It takes almost a billion dollars these days to research and test a new drug for FDA approval. The world's largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, maker of Lipitor and Viagra, is one of the companies still working to come up with new antibiotics.

Dr. Martin MacKay is Pfizer's head of drug research: "Of 100 ideas that we think of in our laboratories, only one will make it into medicine, so it's a huge risk." "