> But yes, big pharma relies almost exclusively on patents to recoup R&D costs.
What? I was under the impression that they rely mostly on advertising to recoup costs, their advertising budgets are generally much larger than their R&D budgets.
Coincidentally, I just posted a huge rant against, "It's just marketing" in another thread, but I'll respond to this much less rantier.
Big pharma uses patents to protect their monopoly on a drug for seven(?) years after its introduced. Once that window is up, generics come in and take a huge chunk of sales. Pharma uses marketing and advertising to push their new drugs to try to sell as many during the patent window as they possibly can, when they have a large markup on it.
These days big pharma has outsourced all their early stage development to startups, purchasing compounds in the late stages through acquisition. They do pay for research, but it's not going to look that way on their balance sheet.
Their primary function, as you say, is shifting far towards the marketing end.
> What? I was under the impression that they rely mostly on advertising to recoup costs, their advertising budgets are generally much larger than their R&D budgets.
It's completely irrelevant what the size of their advertising budgets are. They will increase their advertising budget as long as they think that the added revenue will be larger than the added costs.
But if they have no patent protection, they will probably have no profitable product to advertise at all.
What? I was under the impression that they rely mostly on advertising to recoup costs, their advertising budgets are generally much larger than their R&D budgets.