This is real.
The generic name for Revlimid is Lenalidomide.
"Since its initial approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2005 for the treatment of certain cancers, the price of Lenalidomide, manufactured by Celgene, has risen significantly. At its launch, the cost per pill was $218, equating to an annual cost of approximately $55,000 for a standard regimen. Following FDA approval for multiple myeloma in mid-2006, the price per pill increased to $280, or about $70,560 annually. As of 2023, the price per pill had reached $892.Since its approval, Revlimid cost has increased 26 times. According to a deposition by a Celgene executive, marked as highly confidential, the manufacturing cost of each Revlimid pill has remained approximately $0.25 throughout this period. Celgene claimed its patent protected Revlimid until 2027, and has engaged in several practices to prevent other manufacturers from producing a generic version of the drug, including refusing to sell the drug to other drug makers for testing purposes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenalidomide
Lenalidomide became available as a generic medicine in the Netherlands in 2022. The price in the Netherlands then dropped from €218 to €0.90 per pill. https://www.margriet.nl/gezondheid/kankermedicijn-revlimid-goedkoper-waarom~b43e1f4b/
Disgusting.
Freedom apparently.
The pharma industry likes to defend its pricing by saying:
The second pill cost 25¢.
The first pill cost $800 million.
What they never actually say is that the US government (thereby the taxpayers) heavily subsidized most of that cost.
Big Pharma could use its own Mario Brother, just saying.
Even if we go by 0 subsidies as an argument, anything past around the 800 thousandth pill sold has already paid for itself and is now pure profit.
The argument deserves to burn alongside whoever uses it to extort people for life saving care.
Also most pharma research is done by public universities that private pharma companies then buy the rights to.
The clinicals tend to be ran by the companies pushing for go to market. Those also cost millions
Only because they see huge profits coming later.
If they couldn’t overcharge us for the drugs, they wouldn’t buy up the fucking patents in the first place. And why should they be allowed to buy the patents for life-saving drugs that we, the people, paid to fucking develop on the first place?
All health care and pharma CEOs need to be lined up against the fucking wall TBH. They’re traitors.
They can be. But often they aren’t fully self-funded.
Happy cake day.
Most? I’m incredulous but I don’t know the actual answer.
Brave to assume that only one country gives a subsidy.
Australia has the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme that does the same thing.I’m on board with Wario flat-out eating the next one.
I thought waluigi was going to do the wawawewa dance in their faces
Waluigi is King
Let’s-a go!
Best selling? Or largest profit margin?
Yah, bestselling is wrong.
Most profitable would be the term.
It’s almost like health care and free market economics aren’t compatible
Fucking evil.
Pharma profits are too high, but you can’t really tell by that kind of comparison. The parent company (Bristol Myers Squibb) that produces Revlimid has profit margins around 30% which is high, but obviously nowhere near what those numbers suggest.
The difference is the cost of development of both successful drugs and drugs which go nowhere. So if the company made zero profit by reducing prices across the board, the price of Revlimid could come down to $666 per pill, still each costing 25 cents - that obviously still looks crazy!
Read the article. The company wasn’t the one to discover it. They bought it for pennies then put in minimal research to further develop it, but only based on the research of another doctor who wasn’t with the company. Then they put in another round of research to develop it once more only to cheat the patent law, not to improve the drug efficacy. In the end they spent far less than the normal amount to develop what normally justifies the cost. Then, the price hikes were independent of development pushes and were tied only to quarterly profit demands.
How much do executive payouts, lobbying, and marketing costs take out from those profit margins?
At least some of this information is publicly available and you can go look it up. Or I can. But before that, what do you guess those costs are? Their yearly revenue is about $48bn, to give you a starting point.
My point is that the only way to make sense of this situation is to look at it in another way, and if you do look at it that way, you see that, yes, they are making excessive profits. But not so excessive as the original perspective would say.
In case you’re skeptical still, take your estimate and ask: do you think the company spends so much on all of those items that it would make a comparison of the price to the cost of manufacturing an individual pill look reasonable?
Because I don’t think there is any realistic number you can come up with that would make this line of argument sensible, which is my point. Do you complain about having to pay $10 to buy a book when printing a single book costs like $2?
Oh man, if only there were some way to socialize the costs of developing new drugs by having the government fund that research!
Oh wait…we already do that? And we still let these cunts basically war-profiteer while people die? And you defend it? C’mon.
$10 no.
If that book enabled sick people to continue living another year, and they started out charging $2000 and gradually increased that to $10000 while the book production cost remained at $2, there would begin to be many ethical questions.
You’re right that the per-pill cost is only the start of what it takes to develop / test / manufacture / distribute / market the pill. But the first two are done by the time the pill comes to market and the last is minimal because you have a captive market, people who have the cancer the pill is treatment for.
Increasing the cost year after year, because you have a captive market of people that will die without your product, should raise significant ethical and legal questions. Especially because large parts of the research and testing are publicly subsidized anyway.
I tend to agree.
A container of raspberries costs like $8 and the cost to produce them is $0. They grow on bushes for free.
Thats if you ignore all of the other things that go into land, labor, planning, growing, harvesting, cleaning, packaging, and shipping. Just like this article did.
Pharma companies could also be considered government and worker owned and pay for the cost with taxpayer money…oh wait, we already subsidize this stuff with our taxes.
oh wait, we already subsidize this stuff with our taxes.
Privatize profits, socialize losses.
I also hate the system (and I work in research, meaning that my work directly goes into the profits of these companies) however it does eventually lead to better drugs getting developed and through the years their prices do decrease steeply once the patent terminates.
I hope we came up with a better system to handle this.
I’d like a public European pharmaceutical company to exist, that would solve many of these problems.
We should gamify it. We should socialize the medicine, so everyone can afford it - I mean, come on- but then:
If you work in a lab which creates a life saving drug - you get a ticker tape parade through every fucking city in the USA - you get a bronze statue in the “park of medical heroes.” Everyone knows you as “the man who fucking cured HSHBRHF variant 4x.”
Better than a parade for some athlete or sports team of dubious value.
their prices do decrease steeply once the patient terminates.
DAE read this as patient‽
Nope.
The pharma industry might be the only industry that buys in tons and sell in milligram
Babe, wake up. Insulin 2 dropped.
This is America.
biologics(this includes cancer biologics, autoimmune,psoriasis, eczema, and some rare diseases) is where pharms make thier money. because they are most thousands a month, wholesale, insurance is very stingy about covering certain biologics. although some do have a “coupon” option.
Oh yeah love that coupon. They approve the first few months to show you it will work and then jack up the price
The price of biologics kills me. I know it costs about $20 dollars for a month of GLP-1 agonists, because I’ve made similar peptides myself in grad school. Something like a Solid Phase Peptide Synthesizer runs $10-250K, but the cost to synthesize a 40 amino acid linear peptide at industrial scale is like…$0.30 USD per milligram. Shorter chain peptides are even cheaper. A 15AA linear peptide can be as low as $0.01/mg.
There are of course other expenses, especially labor, facilities, certification, and waste disposal, but these companies are still easily making 40-50% profit margins on biologics. Compare this to non-biologics pharmaceutical profit margins around 15-25%, or for other industry comparisons, grocery stores around 1-3%, restaurants 3-10%, and software at 15-20%.
This fucking disparity is why there’s now a parallel industry revolving around equally questionable alternative treatments.
Bristol Myers Squibb also makes my cancer drug, Sprycel, which has a similar price tag at just over $18k a month without insurance.
They also make my mother’s heart medication Eliquis, which is similarly costly as well.
Have you considered just not having cancer instead?
Just Turn It Offf dude
My sister in law in Indonesia has (had? Not sure) stage four cancer and is only alive over the last 4 years because the family are having to pay for the expensive drug. I can’t remember the name, but it was the on the UKs NHS refused to use because of the cost.
The medication matches the household income. That’s two fully grown adults and one working child.
I know the NHS here is always talked about as being in trouble, but in still glad we have it.
If you haven’t already, you should be looking at generic dasatinib, released more than a year ago. It’ll be a fraction of the cost.
as far as I know they heavily subsidize the cost especially if you don’t have insurance
Drugs can be massively expensive to make with some needing many decades of work so it makes sense they are sold for a lot to gain back that investment. The only issue is if they don’t drop the price after they have recouped the cost and profit they needed. Capitalism strikes again.
This only has legs if they’re developed without being largely government funded, which to my understanding isn’t true for a lot of drugs.
I think they’d justify that by saying they need to ensure the funds they need for future research on other breakthrough treatments. This is not entirely baseless, but just another nail in the coffin for why medical research shouldn’t be funded primarily through capitalist methods.
400000% markup seems a bit excessive
Only because you’re the one being charged not the one charging
Reasonably priced recreational drugs:
the 3 addictive powders: $10/oz, pure
Weed: $100/lb
You could actually earn plenty of money at half these prices, but I made allowances for sin taxes.
Have you seen how much it costs to develop novel drugs? It’s definitely a bit excessive, but also probably not as much as you think.
thats thier claim, but they recover those R and D within selling the drug for a few years. but we know they are partially if not entirely subsidized by the govt, i think all the pharms do is marketing, and poaching SCIENTISTS willing to do the research, some do fund it as well.
Agreed
A condition of public funding should be that aggregate internal rate of return, exclusive of executive team remuneration, should be published and capped, verified by independent audit.
I don’t know a pharmaceutical that isn’t audited by a big 4 firm, so you have part of that already
a condition would be expected lower cost of what the pharm is charging too.
The patent eventually expires and then the generics come out more cheaply.
it takes 20 years though, in the mean time they can charge how ever they want in the us.
20 years isn’t as long as it seems.
I only had to wait 17 years for lyrica (pregabalin) to go generic. I like it better than gabapentin so 👉👈
It doesn’t look like it is going to be any cheaper
In the United States. Elsewhere in the world it’s significantly cheaper.
You also arent funding the development of the drug that worked, but also the dozen that didnt.
Not saying they arent predatory, just that the math of “The pill only costs $0.25” is a massive oversimplification.
Keep in mind though that this research is often government subsidized, and sometimes by multiple countries.
it is why some british pharm company can charge alot more in the us, than in the UK.(one of the companies andrew witty of UHG used to work at)
That’s right. Which is why it’s such a complicated topic.
Don’t worry, the government subsidies a huge portion of that research already.
and politicians campaigns, and the whole parties get padded with money from them to avoid lowering the costs.
It’s a public good. The company should be owned by the government and workers, ergo they don’t need to make a profit.
Here it’s provided for free by the public health system.
