This is not good news... via forbes:
"Medicines change our world, preventing heart attacks, easing mental illness, and prolonging the lives of cancer patients. But according to Forbes’ annual lists of theWorld’s Billionaires and the 400 Richest Americans, they don’t create billion-dollar fortunes.
On the 400, which was released last fall, I could only find three men for who became rich by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug. If we go into the deeper pool of the billionaires list, which includes 1210 people with fortunes of over $1 billion, there still aren’t many candidates.
Part of the reason is that health care in general is a pretty bad choice of a sector if you want to make a mega-fortune. Only 14 of the 400, or 3.5%, get their money from health care or medicine. On the 1210-person billionaires list, about 60, or 5%, made their money in health care. That compares to 90 billionaires from the tech industry, 80 from finance, and 140 who make their money from investments. (All that data is available by using our lists — and counting.).
why biotech hasn’t produced a Bill Gates, a Sergey Brin, or a Mark Zuckerberg. All of those men were able to make their fortunes by deploying their technical expertise quickly, with low barriers to entry. They might have needed outside investors, but they did not have to give up their controlling stakes. They made the right bet, and they got rich.
In biotech, by contrast, investors have to make the right bet and stick with it for years. Making matters worse, not only are the time frames of drug development measured in years or decades, the cost can be extremely high. A cheap drug development program can cost $50 million; an expensive one, for a heart drug, for instance, might cost well more than $1 billion. Most inventors who manage to invent a new drug and hold on to some interest in it cash out before the medicine gets to market or end up so diluted that they don’t make that much money. An odd result of this is that the men who have become billionaires by developing medicines have done so based on drugs that wouldn’t make anybody’s short list of the most important or best-selling medicines."
"Medicines change our world, preventing heart attacks, easing mental illness, and prolonging the lives of cancer patients. But according to Forbes’ annual lists of theWorld’s Billionaires and the 400 Richest Americans, they don’t create billion-dollar fortunes.
On the 400, which was released last fall, I could only find three men for who became rich by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug. If we go into the deeper pool of the billionaires list, which includes 1210 people with fortunes of over $1 billion, there still aren’t many candidates.
Part of the reason is that health care in general is a pretty bad choice of a sector if you want to make a mega-fortune. Only 14 of the 400, or 3.5%, get their money from health care or medicine. On the 1210-person billionaires list, about 60, or 5%, made their money in health care. That compares to 90 billionaires from the tech industry, 80 from finance, and 140 who make their money from investments. (All that data is available by using our lists — and counting.).
why biotech hasn’t produced a Bill Gates, a Sergey Brin, or a Mark Zuckerberg. All of those men were able to make their fortunes by deploying their technical expertise quickly, with low barriers to entry. They might have needed outside investors, but they did not have to give up their controlling stakes. They made the right bet, and they got rich.
In biotech, by contrast, investors have to make the right bet and stick with it for years. Making matters worse, not only are the time frames of drug development measured in years or decades, the cost can be extremely high. A cheap drug development program can cost $50 million; an expensive one, for a heart drug, for instance, might cost well more than $1 billion. Most inventors who manage to invent a new drug and hold on to some interest in it cash out before the medicine gets to market or end up so diluted that they don’t make that much money. An odd result of this is that the men who have become billionaires by developing medicines have done so based on drugs that wouldn’t make anybody’s short list of the most important or best-selling medicines."
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