Manuel Navia[0] would likely disagree. To an extent, at least.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
I read some article a while ago explaining that a lot of these costs are inflated by the drug cartels, er, I mean big pharma. And that a lot of regulations are there to create artificial barriers to entry and are promoted by big pharma for this reason. It comes all of one piece: patents encourage lazy encumbancy which encourages regulation, which encourages patents.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
[0]http://www.oxbio.com/mnavia.html