Pharmaceuticals companies used to be research enterprises that discovered and developed drugs. Then they became marketing giants, skilled at selling as many blockbuster pills as possible. Lately, they have turned into mergers and acquisitions machines, buying and selling medicines invented by others. It is hard to view their evolution as progress……
“We would expect Big Pharma’s current level of R&D spending to become a luxury that investors no longer tolerate,” wrote a group of McKinsey consultants in 2011.