I understand that it takes a lot of research effort to get a drug into the market. The pharmaceutical pipeline is famous for its failure rate where an overwhelming majority of candidate drugs will not reach the market. Couple that with the incredibly long qualification process (a drug usually takes ~15 years from discovery to market due numerous FDA trials) and it's not hard to imagine the immense cost required to develop a drug. Having said that, I fully agree with the reply beneath mine (rtechie) that pharma is spending way too more on marketing than it should and this increased expense is being passed on to the users. A good example would be those trinkets given out to doctors as well as all those all-expenses-paid conventions.
Submitter here. Thanks for all those replies. Some of them were really helpful and will no doubt be food for thought when I consider my options. I did an internship in one of the big pharma companies (**K) and managed to do some interesting (to me at least) work related to molecular drug discovery using computational approaches. As a CS student, I would have never imagined using the stuff that I learned on a field such as this. The only thing that gives me reservations about working for big pharma is of course the ethics. I don't mean the animal testing part (security was quite tight at our research site as we were frequently the target of militant animal rights groups) but rather the gouging patients with ridiculously priced drugs part.
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I'd mod this up if I had points left. Same thing happened to me.
I understand that it takes a lot of research effort to get a drug into the market. The pharmaceutical pipeline is famous for its failure rate where an overwhelming majority of candidate drugs will not reach the market. Couple that with the incredibly long qualification process (a drug usually takes ~15 years from discovery to market due numerous FDA trials) and it's not hard to imagine the immense cost required to develop a drug. Having said that, I fully agree with the reply beneath mine (rtechie) that pharma is spending way too more on marketing than it should and this increased expense is being passed on to the users. A good example would be those trinkets given out to doctors as well as all those all-expenses-paid conventions.
Submitter here. Thanks for all those replies. Some of them were really helpful and will no doubt be food for thought when I consider my options. I did an internship in one of the big pharma companies (**K) and managed to do some interesting (to me at least) work related to molecular drug discovery using computational approaches. As a CS student, I would have never imagined using the stuff that I learned on a field such as this. The only thing that gives me reservations about working for big pharma is of course the ethics. I don't mean the animal testing part (security was quite tight at our research site as we were frequently the target of militant animal rights groups) but rather the gouging patients with ridiculously priced drugs part.