Slashdot Mirror
Offshoring Trends Net Biotech Firms
Makarand writes "According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, BioTech, once considered to be
the next innovative sector to help offset the jobs losses from IT offshoring, is
showing
signs of riding an
offshoring wave of its own. Foreign governments with a national
priority to attract biotech businesses with highly trained research workers and new
research centers are the new forces to reckon with in preventing the
exodus of biotech
jobs. Drug developers are looking at ways to cut costs of drug development as Americans and their employers are starting to constantly worry about the high price of prescription drugs. The lower costs of clinical trials and the ease with which human subjects can be recruited for drug tests in other countries are making biotech jobs susceptible to offshoring."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't outsourcing a shining example of capitalism working exactly as it should? People always get so bent out of shape about it, but fundamentally it's rewarding the people/countries who are willing and able to do the same work for less. If you look at the unequal distribution of wealth as a problem (which I do), then the good news is that poor countries will get richer, as will the uber-rich that now have to pay their workforce less. The bad news is for the middle class. American left-wingers would do well to remember that the people receiving out-sourced jobs probably need them more than Americans. And American right-wingers would do well to remember that unless they're very rich, they're likely getting shafted.
I see one of the big reasons for offshoring as the current medical system. The ridiculous costs of attempting healthcare for workers is one of the costs of employing people.
Offshoring doesn't carry that burden. Health care should be 100% unrelated to employer packages
Ironic
RST
The US can do R&D like no other.
You assume that to be the case. What if it isn't true?
The USA has many of the best researchers partly because you've been able to take the cream from other countries by offering higher salaries. What if that isn't the case in the future?
How does the US prescription system work? Are doctors prescribing branded drugs over cheaper, generic drugs in order to receive funding from drug companies?
Actually, it's more the case that doctors, faced with a bewildering choice of new drugs to keep up with every single year, end up prescribing the drug that they're most familiar with. This ends up usually being the drug that they're given the most free samples of.
As far as HMOs are concerned, they have a list of drugs and their generic equivalents, and if you use the brand name, you'd better have a damn good reason for doing so.
The only people getting funding from drug companies are researchers, and clinical test sites. For regular folks (ie, doctors, interns, etc.) they get a lot of swag and free drug samples (as well as seminars, etc.), but they're not supposed to get cash.
Frankly, high drug costs (at the counter, not high development costs) leading to offshoring is a red herring. The trend toward offshoring has to do more with escaping regulatory hurdles which prevent certain types of research (stem cells, anyone?), the lousy payoff in domestic drug research, and the rise of very competitive research and testing labs overseas.
But considering I work for a startup pharmaceutical company, I feel I gotta say something. Lots of people here seem to think that the HIGH costs of drugs are related to pure profit. Working as a techie in the field myself, I'm really surprised people don't know that the high costs has more to do with spending $10-20 MILLION dollars to get a drug through the FDA then it does with trying to make a profit on it.
It's no wonder people go overseas...drugs are a LOT easier to produce there..
And yes, $10 million is usually the minimum amount of money needed to get APPROVAL to get a single drug into the marketplace in the US. Anyone else knows of a better way to sell a product that costs $10 million + production costs to produce BEFORE they see a profit?
Honestly, you have better luck with a Krispy Kreme donut.....
No, the right question is: what jobs can't be offshored? And the answer is damned few of them -- only those that truly require a physical presence.
And guess what? Technology reduces the number of jobs that require a physical presence. You think the fact that offshoring is happening right now is an accident? No, it's because we now have the communications technology to make it practical.
So the only question left is what all the extra competition is going to do. I think it's going to destroy the global economy, as corporations take the extra profit and distribute it to those who already have the most money: executive staff, board members, and investors.
In short, I think this will destroy what little middle class the world has left, and put us squarely back in the middle ages when people were either insanely rich or dirt poor.
In fact, because offshoring forces entire economies to compete with each other with the price of labor, and thus the standard of living, being the only variable, I think we'll start to see some countries start to use prison labor to compete. That'll definitely take us back to the dark ages.
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Actually, if these are US/EU based companies, it does surprise me. I work for a large CRO (Contract Research Organization) and meeting compliance with the FDA on 21 CFR Part 11 is grueling. If these are US based companies, they will be held to these same standards. I know that EU and Japan have very similar requirements for this kind of research. However, if these are completely off-shore, how much longer will it take these BioTechs to actually get their products thru the FDA and similar agencies??