Might sound like a loaded question, but hear me out.
In the Good ol’ USA, generic drugs are required by the FDA to have the exact same make up as the name brand drug (ie. Benadryl vs generic Diphenhydramine). I’d imagine this is also a requirement in other countries.
So how exactly do those companies turn a profit when a generic version of their drug can swoop in and undercut them?
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You get 20 years exclusivity before other companies can make your generic molecule.
Then there’s a process called evergreening, where just at the end of the patent, say 17 years in, the company will unveil a new version of the drug, say a prolonged release version or some other feature that trumps the original in some way. Then everyone who’s on that drug e.g. Cardura (doxazosin), who’d normally be switching to a cheaper generic doxazosin once the 20 year patent expires, is tempted to switch instead to Cardura XL – which the manufacturers can patent for another 20 years, and let the generics try and compete with their inferior original product
One the one hand, it’s scummy profiteering, on the other hand, if drug companies couldn’t make profit there’d be no incentive for anyone to do the decades of research needed to develop a new drug.
And for every drug that makes it to market and is profitable, there’s 3 or 4 that don’t take make a profit, and hundreds or thousands of molecules that you might sink years of research into and spend millions on only to find they have no medical use at all, or like Vioxx or thalidomide the side effects were worse than initially feared
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