drug research and development

striking article in BMJ about the image and reality of pharmaceutical research and development (see pharmaceutical R&D bmj 2012 in dropbox).  the $400 billion/yr drug industry has promoted an "innovation crisis" myth that they are too strapped to do the very expensive R&D. reality is that overall there has been a constant rate of new drugs over the past 60 years. the real innovation crisis is in the fact that the percentage of new medications which really offer important therapeutic advantage is on the order of 15% (ie, vast majority of new drugs are "look-alikes", ie yet another ACE inhibitor, statin, etc). this has not changed since i saw data in the 70s. the authors of the BMJ note "since the mid-1990s, independent reviews have also concluded that about 85-90% of all new drugs provide few or no clinical advantages for patients". and still, of the large amount of money spent on R&D, 80% of basic research comes from public sources. they also note that the drug company claims of huge amounts spent by them on R&D are dramatically overstated (eg, 1/2 of amount stated by them comes from "estimating how much profit would have been made if the money had been invested in an index fund of pharmaceutical companies that increased in value 11%/yr, compounded over 15 yrs.") and the down side in companies pushing for look-alike type drugs in order to extend their patents is that many of them are not as good as the original and/or less safe (eg vioxx, rosiglitazone, gatifloxacin...)

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