• piecat@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      There is some level of R&D they do to productize it, manufacturability and scaling. And running drug safety trials cannot be cheap, especially the liability insurance.

      That all said, I think it’s criminal that the university labs pay so little. PhD students barely make over $40k, set by the NIH. Not adjusted for CoL either.

      I think I have more of an issue with the for-profit nature of pharma companies. Shareholders shouldn’t be involved in medicine.

    • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      The woman who got the nobel prize for the mRNA research that led to the Pfizer vaccine did a lot of it while employed at Pennsylvania University before they fired her because they didn’t see the research leading to making them money. Then she moved on to Biontech where she continued the research.

      I’m not sure how much was done at the university but it was probably not insignificant and then biontech got lucky and snapped it up for basically free.