Read this very nice piece by Equitable Growth young whippersnapper Raksha Kopparam summarizing the strong evidence that societal well-being is badly damanged by yet another pharmaceutical industry market failure: "killer acquisitions": Raksha Kopparam: Killer Acquisitions Lead to Decreased Innovation and Competition in the U.S. Prescription Drug Market https://equitablegrowth.org/killer-acquisitions-lead-to-decreased-innovation-and-competition-in-the-u-s-prescription-drug-market/: "Colleen Cunningham... Florian Ederer and Song Ma... consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry is probably stifling rather than promoting innovation. Approximately 6 percent of pharmaceutical acquisitions are what the authors refer to as 'killer acquisitions', in which an incumbent firm acquires a product in development that could compete with the incumbent’s own product and then subsequently terminates development of the target firm’s product, thus killing competition and innovation.... Questor Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s acquisition of the drug Synacthen from Novartis International AG of Switzerland. United States-based Questor in 2000 held a monopoly over an adrenocorticotropic hormone drug called Acthar, the then-dominant treatment for rare epileptic diseases such as infantile spasms. In 2000, Acthar was priced at roughly $40 a vial. In the mid-2000s, however, Novartis began developing Synacthen, a synthetic version of Acthar. In 2013, Questor acquired the production rights for Synacthen and shut down development of the drug shortly thereafter...
#noted #2020-02-11
