In America it takes 800 million USD and about 7 years to get a drug to market. Fewer than one in 1000 that enter the pipeline ever get past animal testing. It’s a high hurdle, but when a drug makes it it’s recognized worldwide as a “sure thing”. Korean firms just aren’t capitalized enough to make that leap, which is why LG is the only real research firm in the country, and it’s moving Sloooowly. Drug firms everywhere, including the Korean ones mentioned above, have enough R&D power to make incremental improvements to existing drugs, come up with new delivery systems, etc, but they don’t have the money to risk on major drug development.

My view: it is good and right that major US and EU drug companies get paid well for undertaking the massive and risky task of new drug development. It is also good and right that research efforts and resources be directed toward the afflictions of poor people and poor countries and the development of drug industries in smaller countries like Korea. But I can’t agree that the latter effort must necessarily be done while stripping big Western pharma companies of the rights that other businesses take for granted.

You’re seriously being racist in saying drug development is a “western” skill. Do you also contend that yellow people are just copy catting “western” inventions and mass producing them by cheap labor? Because that’s also something I’ve heard from people like you. Feel free to defend yourself or hide.

But there’s certainly no question that the modern pharmacopeia is based upon Western concepts of disease and its treatment. Most of what Dr. Reddy and his ilk are doing is reverse engineering/copying.

It’s not racist to point that out.

And of course, scientists of many different Asian ethnicities do such research in the U.S. and Europe. You may even become one of them, if you can get over your Gundam/Jpn porn obsession.

And all this political and social pressure? Yeah, socialists are always willing to spend someone else’s money to accomplish their own goals.

I don’t think I said anything besides interesting.

Do you know what Leishmania is? How about Paromomycin? What about the term, orphan drug?

You know, concerning AIDs drugs, these were only made more available to Africa after historically documentable heavy political and social pressure. Whatever.

So since these ‘greedy’ companies don’t want to give away all their money to develop medicines for poor people, maybe you and other socialists will step into the breach and hand over your own cash to get the ball rolling?

And no, you are wrong about drug companies in their approach to third world situations. Many are playing important roles in helping third world countries by donating drugs, offering drugs at cost and setting up hospitals and foundations in poor countries. Not all of them do this, but a good number are and more are coming on-stream with helping out. The drug companies are not charitable organizations (they do give away alot) so any claims that they should be forced to help out poor people should be backed up with cash. Get ready to fork over your own to help out sick poor people.