-
Asked by Mayonnaise Bees to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 9 Nov 2016.
-
Steven Street answered on 9 Nov 2016:
Hi Mayonnaise Bees,
That’s a very good question!!
The answer is, very expensive! before any drugs can be given to people by doctors they have to go through clinical trials. These alone can be very expensive – the average cost is on the order of hundreds of millions of pounds…. another worrying factor is that for every drug which passes clinical trials, there are ~10,000 failures. The costs of these drugs also need to be recovered by the companies funding the successful drugs.
The overall cost for developing a new drug and bringing it to market is on the order of billions of pounds…. see for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27340835
so it’s quite a lot! But in the early phases it’s much less…. so my research has a total budget for my 4 year PhD of around £25,000 for research costs. This is more than enough, though sometimes I can do reactions with £100′ of chemicals in them!
Hopefulyl that answers your question a bit!?
Steve
-
-
Hannah Bolt answered on 10 Nov 2016:
Hi Mayonnaise Bees,
As Steve says, developing new drugs is VERY expensive. For every potential drug that gets tested in the ‘clinical trials’ that Steve has mentioned, thousands more will have been made but fail to get to that stage. So many drugs also don’t pass clinical trials and every failed drug pushes up the cost of ones that manage to get approval.
At the moment, it is thought that bringing one new medicine to the market costs $2.6 billion!
In my research I spend about £5,000 each year on reagents to make my drugs and other equipment. I also am paid a wage by my research funding. I get to use the fancy machines and instruments in my University too, and some of these cost millions of pounds!
Hannah
Comments