According to my calculations, sometime this month research and development spending in the United States by pharmaceutical companies will pass the $100 million per day mark.

The $100 million/day figure assumes R&D spending seven days a week, and it doesn’t include R&D spending outside the US, or spending by smaller biotech, medical device, diagnostic, or health IT firms.  By comparison, the National Institutes of Health spends about $79 million a day.

With all the reports about the slowdown in the industry’s output, higher barriers for FDA approval of new medicines, and the criticism of the industry and the FDA, I hope that the industry’s ongoing R&D investments do produce new medicines that are valuable to individual patients and society overall.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 9:26 am and is filed under Innovation, Miscellaneous, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.