Assessing Pharmaceutical Research and Development Costs

In their Original Investigation published in a recent issue of JAMAInternal Medicine, Prasad and Mailankody examine the costs of bringing a single drug with an oncological indication to the market. They conclude that 10 selected companies had a median investment cost of $648 million for the development of their drug, whereas the median revenue in 4 years on average was $1658.4 million. This further reinforces the notion that there are large profits to be made with drug development, and that current pharmaceutical drug prices are unrelated to the actual costs for research and development.