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Comment by justjonathan | Hacker News Reader

Talking about production costs of drugs, as an input to price, is as relevant as discussing download cost as input to software prices (or any digital media prices).

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Especially a drug which is so supply-constrained, on the time-scale of the pandemic. Even if you ignore the research cost, what's the right price for the one large batch left over from Ebola, in the time until you cook up another large batch?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remdesivir#Manufacturing_and_d...

Correct me if I'm wrong: it's only supply constrained due to patent protections, no? Or is there something inherently hard to replicate if a rogue country decided to reverse engineer the drug?

IIRC it is well-known how to synthesize remdesivir, so nobody would actually have to reverse-engineer anything, but this stuff is particularly hard to synthesize on an industrial level, with some steps in the process taking weeks to complete without easy ways to speed it up. Also, each step only has a certain yield which is relatively low, so you need to put in a comparatively huge amount of raw material into the first step in order to get a tiny amount of remdesivir out from the last step, months later.

It seems a little bit like producing Whisky: you can't just decide now to produce a huge batch of 12-year-old Lagavulin and have it ready next month.

Here is a longer description: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-maki....

I believe Gilead's target is 500,000 doses by November. In an ideal world, they'd probably want to sell doses to just about every person with COVID, but they can't, due to supply constraints.

Not an expert but I thought this one was actually hard to make. Or at least, sufficiently different that tooling up a production line would take time & money, so that the big generic guys couldn't just open the taps. (But I could be wrong here.)

I thought the big Indian manufacturers already just-about ignored patents, these only restrict what can be shipped to the west.

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