Systemic biases in medical research

Many scientists say that medical research suffers from biases which make some promising ideas less likely to get researched.

The process of developing and testing a new drug and obtaining regulatory approval for it is very expensive. Manufacturers naturally prioritise researching drugs that will bring them a large return on their investment over less profitable ones. This means that promising drugs that don't have much potential for profit are often not researched. Sometimes a government or a charitable group will fund research into a promising drug, but there is a fairly small amount of this funding to go round - research by manufacturers makes up a large proportion of spending on drug development.

In a case of link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive, this means that drugs that only keep a disease in check or alleviate symptoms are often prioritised over drugs that can actually cure a disease (since the former have to be taken long-term, meaning that more doses will be sold), and drugs that will cost the patient a lot of money are prioritised over cheaper ones.

Something that often affects whether a drug is profitable, and therefore to be researched, or not is whether or not it can be patented. If something is patented, only the company that has the patent can sell it, and they can therefore charge high prices. If it is not patented, they can't charge very much above the cost of manufacture because other manufacturers will undercut them.

Many things which are potentially very useful areas of research attract fairly little research for this reason.

• New antibiotics (usually require only a short course)
• Vaccines (usually require only a single dose, or a dose every year or every few years)
• New uses for existing drugs whose patents have expired
• Herbal remedies (unpatentable, although identifying an active compound in a plant, synthesising a slight variation of it which can be patented, and developing and marketing that is a fairly common form of drug development)
• Non-medical methods, e.g. the effect of exercise or obesity on a particular condition
• Medical devices (reusable, therefore only the most expensive ones will make as much money as a drug which has to be bought each time)

Many of these are recognised as promising areas of research even by mainstream scientists, but not much is often done about them.