it’s a polypeptide with two unnatural aminoacids, this aint rocket surgery. doses are in low miligram range, so still rather on the pricey side
The Egg of Columbus does spring to mind, reading your comment.
one of these aminoacids has a rather fancy linker attached to another two aminoacids, getting this to work was probably the hardest part of development of this compound. once you have structure it’s a solved problem, esp with peptide coupling chemistry, it can be literally printed on solid substrate residue by residue (humans make it cheaper, greener and on larger scale tho)
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Ozempic could be profitably produced for less than $5 a month even as maker Novo Nordisk A/S charges almost $1,000 in the US, according to a study that revives questions about prices for top-selling treatments for diabetes and obesity.
The blockbuster drug could be manufactured for 89 cents to $4.73 for a month’s supply, figures that include a profit margin, researchers at Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders reported in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The study extends research showing how steep US markups are for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy and underlines longstanding criticism of prices for diabetes therapies, especially insulin.
By some estimates, however, the reductions made those products more profitable because they eliminated rebates paid to pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who negotiate prices for payers and employers.
State health plans and Medicaid offices are seeing growing bills for Ozempic and its sister drug Wegovy, raising questions about whether the increases in cost are sustainable.
In January, North Carolina cut off coverage of anti-obesity medicines for state employees, citing soaring costs and lack of agreement on pricing from drugmakers.
Saved 76% of original text.
alt link?
via Wayback Machine; archive.is goes down quite often.
- When do they lose the patent
- Can we please make drug companies lose their parents faster?
There should be a limit, like they lose exclusivity when they break even plus 5% or 10% of the total cost of RD or something.
Also if you use federal (or state) funding for the research and development, you lose it faster.
10 % would mean that more than 9 of 10 research projects need to succeed. The reality is closer to 0.5 of 10, which would require a profit of 2000 % of R&D. Rules like that would stop private funded research. Which is something we can debate, but it should be noted that this would just mean, that countries need to fund medical research, which is currently 270 billion per year, which is 20 % of the US budget. If you want to stop private medical research, you need to raise taxes – plain and simple.
Those numbers will be manipulated. Good line of thought, keep working on the solution.
Yeah obviously, maybe a time limit then but that can also be moved somehow… The only solution to greedy corps is a solid government…
Then they’d just fake the costs of R&D. The US has lots of money, so everyone is charging more; notice how they charge way less in other countries (like $150-250, which is only ≈4,000% markup). That the US average income ($70K) is way different than the US median income ($40K), except for District of Columbia ($80K)… well, whose fault is that?
You can squeeze the rich for 2 years then it’s generic
US states should probably set a price limit based on median income, like from Puerto Rico’s $20K/yr, to District of Columbia’s $80K/yr:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_median_wage_and_mean_wage
Price limits and such are fine but you can’t beat generics for putting pressure on price.
True, but drugs do require some lengthy and expensive R&D.
Starting by isolating a target function, testing thousands of compounds in vitro, hundreds on mice, maybe a dozen on chimps,
soldiers, orsome minority… until human trials get approved, which normally take several years, until a drug gets approved for sale… then depending on how popular it becomes, sales may end up being larger or smaller.Completely forbidding patents on drugs (AKA: government-allowed time-limited paid monopolies), would wipe out all private investors in that research.
Should all drug research be 100% government funded? That’s how you get
corruptionlobbying.Should the FDA controls —already not so tight— be removed? That’s how you get snake oil salesmen (homeopathy, crystals, “praying it away”, random herbal remedies, drugs cut with talcum, etc.).
If we still want the drugs to be developed, and be sold with a minimum of guarantees, the only reasonable solutions that come to mind, go through some sort of government intervention in pricing.
This seems harsh. Maybe they should just lose their patents sooner.
It worked for Batman and he grew up wanting to help others.
If by “help” you mean buy cool toys and beat the shit out of people while wearing skin-tight rubber and lycra (not that I’m kink-shaming, mind)…
As Bruce Wayne he dumps a ridiculous amount of money into Gotham. Food banks, orphanages, hospitals, schools, employment programs, all funded by Bruce Wayne or Wayne Enterprises.
Any other city would be a utopia with the philanthropic support he gives; it’s not his fault Gotham is literally cursed
could be manufactured for 89 cents to $4.73 for a month’s supply
That compares to the monthly US list price of $968.52 for Ozempic, a weekly injection.
I got semaglutide (Rybelsus, the pill form) prescribed for type 2 diabetes. The list price in Spain for a 30 pill format (a month’s worth) is around 130€ ($140) without discounts:
Thanks to the prescription, I get it for free ($0.00)… which turns out to be closer to its actual value. Interesting 🤔
They get you coming and going. Plaster the media with ads for junk food, then really grind you down when you are sick and unhealthy
You believe the fast food companies work in cahoots with the obesity pharma companies?
Sounds like a match made in hell
Exactly!
Wonder how much public funding was used toward the research.
Novo Nordisk is a major contributor to the Danish economy (like that time it practically saved Denmark from a recession, growing the GDP while the rest of Europe slipped into a recession). This single company makes up about 5% of the entire Danish economy.
I doubt this company has received more public funding than it brought back into the Danish treasury. Its weight loss drug is basically transferring money from the US economy over to the Danish economy.
Of course, this is of no solace to the Americans that are paying these high prices, but the country that this company does most of its research in is more than happy to rake in the dollars.
nothing on this page mentions anything about Ozempic, semaglutide, or the amounts of funding received. the closest thing is a list of current diabetes research projects with, again, no amounts listed.
The problem, in a nutshell, is this:
Manchin received large campaign contributions from daughter’s company amid EpiPen scandal
And it ain’t just Manchin, by the way. Remember how instrumental Rep. James Clyburn was in sacking Bernie Sanders during the 2020 presidential primaries? Well, one of the reasons might have been this:
Clyburn has taken more than $1 million in pharma money in a decade, far surpassing peers
Instead of scolding working-class voters for making poor choices, perhaps they should look at their own.
From Time magazine (via Internet Archive):
Senator Bernie Sanders is preparing to grill the CEOs of three major pharmaceutical companies.
Sanders: The reason is that the pharmaceutical industry is an extremely greedy industry. Their goal is simply to make as much money as they possibly can. Every other major industrialized country has—in one form or another—national healthcare programs, which, among other things, guarantees healthcare to all of their people, but also puts them in a position to negotiate the prices of drugs with the companies.
In the United States, up until very recently, the drug companies could charge any price they want for any reason. The result of that is that in some cases, we are seeing the same exact prescription drugs sold in America for more than 10 times what they are sold in Canada, or Europe, or Asia.
This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?
US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it.
It’s not just the US right, though; see my other comment.
George Carlin really nailed it.
(NSFW - language)
The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷♂️)
…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.
The left is definitely more open to considering regulation.
At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.
In reality, they’re being paid well to do nothing about it:
Unusually, in the first half of this year Republicans and Democrats in Congress were virtually neck and neck in pulling in drug industry money, according to a KHN analysis of campaign contributions. In prior years, Republicans dominated giving from that sector, often by huge margins.
At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.
Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.
Before being an appetite suppressant, it is a medication for diabetes.
The problem is not the margin Novo Nordisk makes on an appetite suppressant, contrary to what the headline says.
The twofold problem is the margin on a diabetes drug, which weighs heavily on patients and health insurers around the world. And the potential supply problems for diabetics, when a vital drug is sold as a miracle weight-loss remedy.
A lot of stuff can be made a lot cheaper than it’s sold.
