"The data paint a bleak picture.

"The data paint a bleak picture. The economists find that pharmaceutical companies conduct 30 times more clinical trials for recurrent cancer drugs than for preventive drugs (the effect persists even after adjusting for market size). The authors also show that firms divert their R&D expenditures away from more curable, localised cancers and focus on incurable metastatic and recurrent cancers instead. The patent system encourages pharmaceuticals to pump out drugs aimed at those who have almost no chance of surviving the cancer anyway. This patent distortion costs the U.S. economy around $89 billion a year in lost lives."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/08/innovation ⟲