Opinion - Large Prescription Drug Companies Lack Innovation in New Drug Development, Wall Street...

Large drug companies that "license or otherwise acquire discoveries from universities or small biotech companies, then develop them for commercial production and sponsor the clinical research necessary for FDA," are "hardly creative in the scientific sense," Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School writes in a Wall Street Journal letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece published on June 28 (Angell, Wall Street Journal, 7/7). Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in the opinion piece wrote that it is "current mythology" that "most drug innovation comes from publicly funded research." He wrote, "All or almost all of the drugs and drug classes would not have been developed -- or their development would have been delayed significantly -- in the absence of the scientific or technical... [read full story]