The price of failure

When you talk about the drug industry, the one unavoidable topic is pricing. I like to point out that almost everything that seems bizarre about the business can be traced back to the roughly 90% clinical failure rate, and drug prices are definitely in that category. Most things fail, and they often fail expensively, so when something actually works there is a strong incentive to make as much money from it as possible during its patented lifetime. The relative shortness of that period, which always has to end, is another factor. Prescription drugs are invariably more expensive in the US than other countries, while generic drugs are often cheaper, and that changeover is something that companies will fight to postpone.