

Ask HN: Is there any empirical evidence that patents do good in some industries? - Devilboy

I know most people here will agree that software patents do more harm than good, but is there actual data to show that patents are good for other industries?
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serichsen
It seems that the development of drugs is such an incredibly expensive
investment that you need to grant a limited monopoly to the developer so that
he can recoup on it.

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ig1
Average cost to bring a new drug to market is around $1.5 billion

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tobylane
Drug production is (to oversimplify, please correct) to blindly create
millions of combinations, test the successful-looking versions on rats, cats
and people, and produce billions of the drug. I wonder how the money is split
between those tasks.

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ig1
The biggest expense is typically human clinical trial where you're looking at
a figure in the high hundreds of millions.

