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This is an extremely complex issue which is difficult to unpack in a few short tweets (each of which could individually be the subject of a seminar or indeed a whole PhD), but I'll have a go. Also I desperately need to finish this blog on therapeutic manufacturing scaleup. Sorry! https://twitter.com/Barristotle/status/1356943717760909312
1. Profit motive in biotech. This has driven the majority of therapeutic innovation which frankly has changed the world beyond recognition. The private sector has the wherewithal & risk-appetite to progress biotech innovation, but wouldn't do it without possibility of making ££
The private sector won't turn its attention to non-profit-making enterprise unless encouraged by governments, usually because lots of ppl are dying. Antibiotics don't make money so nobody innovates, @NHSuk's new payment model is a world-leader in hopefully changing this.
Diagnostics would save millions if not 100s of millions of lives but gets relatively low investment/innovation because it's really hard to make money in that area (and believe me I have extensive personal experience of attempting to commercialise a mind-blowingly good diagnostic)
#Covid_19 a case in point: suddenly lots of ppl are dying and quite rightly many big (and little!) pharmacos turned their attention to therapeutics & vaccines. They're selling them for not much above cost til the pandemic ends (that's what the AZ-EU contract was shown to state!)
And a lot of this activity has also been encouraged by governments who are providing lots of money and distribution support. Actually this pandemic is a great example of private and public sectors working well together to solve a huge, immediate global challenge.
I run a for-profit in-house university VC fund, the @ucltf. We simply would not be able to fund the crazy-risky things we do that have real potential to chg the world w/o the possibility of making a return. Happy to discuss dynamics of innovation funding sometime offline!
But to your point, the raison d'être of @ucltf is that it exists for the benefit of @ucl, who get the lion's share of the VC manager's profits from the Fund precisely to plough back into the university and its research. If the Fund does well, the university does really well.
2. Role & limitations of public funding. Even in the US where world's biggest biotech industry raises vast sums of $$ each year, the govt is still the biggest funder of basic research, by orders of magnitude. Most research is not translatable into products (e.g. my own PhD!)...
...but doesn't mean it's worthless, we just don't know where the next big innovations are going to come from. Private sector would (almost) never fund blue-sky research with no expectation of a return, govts do this because it improves humanity (same reason for funding the arts).
It's really, REALLY expensive to get a drug to market ( @TuftsUniversity's estimate is around $1-2bn). Govts can't afford to fund every innovation all the way to mkt or risk taxpayers money to do so. Hence better off letting profit-motivated pharma develop/distribute the products.
Key role of government (which fails entirely in the US but works well elsewhere) is in preventing systematic gouging of consumers. @NICEComms is a good example: drugs only get funded for NHS if they can demonstrate a sufficient benefit in quality-of-life-adjusted-years' benefit.
The public sector therefore dictates and regulates how much the pharma industry can make and if the pharmaco doesn't like the deal then they don't get access to that market! This is critical in ensuring equity of access.
3. Magnitude problems. Is £2bn a lot of money? Is £350m a week for the NHS a lot of money? Apparently the UK's economy is £130bn smaller than it would have been if the country had voted 'remain' four years ago. What does that even mean?
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of big numbers out there in the world. Should @pfizer, who have arguably done a pretty good job along with @BioNTech_Group in developing a vaccine which will save lots of ppls lives not pay their staff a bonus this year?
I'd argue that most of the ppl working at a place like a biotech company or a pharma company are doing so because they actually do want to save people's lives! Should we be upset if they'd made a profit of £20m? How about £200bn? I think it's a really, really complex issue.
Ultimately those companies ARE answerable to their shareholders, who want to see a profit on their investment (just like anyone does e.g. on the shares invested by their pension). Great to see some pension funds now ditching polluting companies' stocks on a lge scale...
But equally perhaps we should complain about other industries that perhaps aren't benefiting people's lives to nearly the same extent as biotech and the profits that they're making on government subsidies...whatever the magnitude.
In that sense, it's govt's job to tax businesses & the shareholders profiting from them properly (e.g. tech companies?!) & therefore to regulate political donations & lobbying & therefore...and so forth in an ongoing fractal of #geopolitical complexity. TL;DR #VaccinesWork yay!!
