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Good Science for Good Pharma—A Public-Health Model

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Good Pharma

Abstract

It’s worse than you think but could be much better than you imagine. In the Introduction, we described and documented the ways in which patent-driven research and prices set at 50–100 times manufacturing costs, have corrupted the research process, the products of pharmaceutical research, medical knowledge, the way drugs are approved, and the prescribing choices physicians make. Drug companies distort each of these steps to maximize profits, usually with little benefit to patients. Risks of serious adverse reactions from new drugs are one in five.1 While patenting may work out better in other areas of industrial research like software development, funding research to find better medicines through patent-protected high prices and monopolistic submarkets has inverted or corrupted biomedical research, especially in rich countries.

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Notes

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© 2015 Donald W. Light and Antonio F. Maturo

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Light, D.W., Maturo, A.F. (2015). Good Science for Good Pharma—A Public-Health Model. In: Good Pharma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374332_10

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