Death by a Thousand Cuts for “Big Drug”

Well, Obama and the left must really be happy with the way things are working out in pharmaceutical research. The evil “Big Drug” companies can no longer afford the R&D costs and FDA hoops to bring new life saving drugs to the market – so they are gradually grinding research to a halt. It’s no longer profitable.

In steps Big Government.

Back in December, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), was proposed by advisors to the NIH to take point on researching new medicines instead of relying on that crappy old free market;

“NIH has never done anything quite like this,” Collins said in a telephone interview.

“We are asking how can we improve the success of getting the ideas from an early stage to a successful clinical trial, because there is a terrible failure rate right now.”

After taking the leftist sledgehammer to the industry, it’s no surprise that the Obama administration is “concerned” that new drugs may not be reaching the market quickly enough;

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drug makers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson’s that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

The initial financing of the government’s new drug center is relatively small compared with the $45.8 billion that the industry estimates it invested in research in 2009. The cost of bringing a single drug to market can exceed $1 billion, according to some estimates, and drug companies have typically spent twice as much on marketing as on research, a business model that is increasingly suspect.
More- [my emphasis]

The pieces are coming together. Blow after blow by the left over the years attempting to destroy medicine as we know it, and who comes to the rescue? But of course, the same leftists who destroyed it in the first place, along with yet another billion-dollar agency (on initial start-up) to do its bidding.