No, they are funding new super-yachts.

The truth is, the biggest pharmaceutical companies aren’t really drug development companies at all: they’re marketing, lobbying, and litigation firms with patent portfolios. While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.

This is completely true. The majority of research, at least for life saving drugs and not baldness cures, takes place at universities and small research firms, much of it funded by the NIH. If the investigators are successful, they spin off a company or license the IP.

Big drug companies then step in, long after the initial “drug discovery” is done. They have captured the regulatory system and, yes, can fund and run Phase 3 trials with their deep pockets and armies of bureaucrats, but at that point they are acting more like record labels, extracting rent (loosely defined) from a convoluted regulatory and distribution system that they themselves had a hand in creating.

Fuck ‘em.

drug companies do little to no basic research. they take something that was studied and do research to figure out the what a mass produced product would be like and run it through the studies necessary to pass usda and fda and such requirements.

any chode who argues that drug prices need to be high to fund research is just a chode being a chode

the Biden administration announced the list of ten drugs over whose price Medicare would, for the first time, negotiate, under new authority granted by the Inflation Reduction Act last year

this is huge news that the drug companies hate

Big Pharma, unsurprisingly, is fighting against the Biden administration’s efforts, launching lawsuits to block the new rules. Meanwhile, writers at the Economist — also unsurprisingly — have come to the aid of Big Pharma in its hour of need. While conceding that Americans do spend too much on drugs, the “newspaper” nonetheless complains that the new “heavy handed” rules “have swung from one extreme to the other.”

and their friends are trying to help them, showing just how reactionary they are to anything that helps patients, by calling negotiation "extreme".. free market is just too scary for these guys i guess..

naturally Big Pharma hopes to get their lawsuits straight onto the Supreme Court docket, where their friends will issue a ruling written by Pfizer

Well if course not. Gotta pay those stock holders

Big profits never fund new research. What justifies new research is a near-term often fairly low risk market opportunity and a mindset to invest in it. Other stuff is out of scope.

There is also a happy medium in terms of profit and competition. A business that is fat and happy will have difficulty doing new things (nothing looks good), and a business just surviving may not have the money and people to invest and the focus is likely on cost cutting and milking the business. On the other hand, there is in an in-between zone, either a company that is struggling to make a profit but has a lot of potential like just getting going or in rapid growth, or one that has been highly profitable but now is seeing a lot more competition and starts to realize that they need to do something. At least my experience from being in R&D (not pharma) for 30 years.