• Question: If you were to design a life saving drug, and got paid alot of money what would you do with the money?

    Asked by to Daren on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Designing a life saving drug is very long and expensive work – it costs about $5 billion, and takes 12 years on average, with 10-100s of people working on the project at any time. The companies that pay people to try and discover new drugs generally own the rights to the new drug and make the money from its sale. So while the people who worked on it get some money from the success a lot of it is used to pay for research into the discovery of other new drugs. Unfortunately, a lot of expensive research is carried out into drugs before it is realised that they won’t work very well or are dangerous and so the money from sales of a new life saving drug also has to help balance out the expense of the failed research.

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