> maybe it’s just me, but most of the new drugs seem to come from USA.
It's just you.
What we see from the US is re-patenting. Citalopram gets a minor change and becomes escitalopram, it gets a new patent and some bullshit sales pitch to make doctors switch from a cheap generic to a more expensive branded med. Or ketamine infusion becomes eskatamine nasal spray - moved from a generic and tricky to administer med to a branded and easy to administer med (and, it turns out, much less effective).
The other thing the US does is "Me too" drugs - someone develops an SSRI and the US is then able to spin up 8 different versions of SSRIs that are different enough to get their own names and patents.
Most of the funding in the US doesn't come from big pharmaceutical companies, but is government funding.
For the new meds that are developed in the US the funding normally comes from Government (NIHR) funding, and not direct from pharmaceutical companies.
It's also difficult to work out what to measure: do we look at GERD (gross expenditure on research and development) or do we look at GDP too? DO we look at the quantity of new meds, or the impact on quality of life or years of life lost to disability? Do we focus on meds aimed at diseases that affect wealthy countries (diabetes, breast cancer, etc) or on disease that mostly affects poorer countries? Because three meds that have moderate impact for a small population are "less" than one med that has a good strong impact on a large population.
It's just you.
What we see from the US is re-patenting. Citalopram gets a minor change and becomes escitalopram, it gets a new patent and some bullshit sales pitch to make doctors switch from a cheap generic to a more expensive branded med. Or ketamine infusion becomes eskatamine nasal spray - moved from a generic and tricky to administer med to a branded and easy to administer med (and, it turns out, much less effective).
The other thing the US does is "Me too" drugs - someone develops an SSRI and the US is then able to spin up 8 different versions of SSRIs that are different enough to get their own names and patents.
Most of the funding in the US doesn't come from big pharmaceutical companies, but is government funding.
For the new meds that are developed in the US the funding normally comes from Government (NIHR) funding, and not direct from pharmaceutical companies.
It's also difficult to work out what to measure: do we look at GERD (gross expenditure on research and development) or do we look at GDP too? DO we look at the quantity of new meds, or the impact on quality of life or years of life lost to disability? Do we focus on meds aimed at diseases that affect wealthy countries (diabetes, breast cancer, etc) or on disease that mostly affects poorer countries? Because three meds that have moderate impact for a small population are "less" than one med that has a good strong impact on a large population.