Customer Economics: What a Pharma Company Pays and Gains
How should a pharmaceutical company think about spending on microgravity research or manufacturing?
Chapter summary
as an option on a better product, priced against its R&D budget, not as a manufacturing cost.
Key takeaways
- 1
A flight campaign of a few million dollars is small against the hundreds of millions to billions spent developing a medicine, and the Merck case shows that a microgravity insight can contribute to a new formulation of a blockbuster.
- 2
The questions are the probability of a useful result, the time it adds and whether the result can be replicated on Earth afterwards.
- 3
Production in orbit is a separate decision that requires regulatory acceptance and supply redundancy.
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