In fact, these companies rarely do their own compound screening and non-clinical research. In fact, most of them are put into clinical research, and compound screening and non-clinical research are mostly done by third-party laboratories. A few years ago, European and American countries developed a new drug, which cost an average of 654.38 billion US dollars and took 654.38+00 years.
What about domestic pharmaceutical companies? 2014,67 listed pharmaceutical companies announced R&D investment with a total investment of * * * 5.356 billion yuan. In this way, Roche's annual investment in scientific research can be worth 670 domestic pharmaceutical companies.
So why do European and American pharmaceutical companies invest so much in R&D? As can be seen from the above figure, the annual sales of the drugs with the largest sales volume are above $10 billion, and Roche, which has the largest investment in scientific research, has lived up to expectations, occupying the 4th, 7th and 8th places on the list. The combined annual sales of these three drugs alone far exceed their investment in scientific research.
According to the principle of patent protection, from the application for patent protection (clinical research can only be carried out after patent protection) to the expiration of the patent, other companies are not allowed to copy it for one * * 20 years, and the research and development cycle is about 10 year, so this drug can be sold exclusively 10 year. If you sell 5 billion dollars a year on average, you can sell 50 billion dollars before the patent expires, which is 50 times the investment in research and development. The indications of drugs with large sales volume are also more specific, focusing on infection, tumor, endocrine, cardiovascular, autoimmune, asthma and other fields. The characteristics of drug use in these fields are more patients, longer drug use time, less substitute drugs and difficult treatment. At present, the research and development of new drugs are mainly concentrated in these fields. Moreover, the company's R&D department "specializes in technology", such as Gillette in the above picture, which basically specializes in the field of virus infection, avoiding the risk of investing money in areas that are not good at it. However, if the new drug developed is used to treat diseases or symptoms such as "cough and expectoration, headache and brain fever, dysmenorrhea and kidney deficiency", there are too many competitors and too many substitute drugs, so it is impossible to have a good expected profit.