How do you get these numbers? Drug production isn’t just R&D. You have to manufacture it, do insane amounts of QC/QA, package it, distribute it; you have to pay all the people who aren’t in strict R&D but service those other functions. You also may well give a sizable chunk of your profits away to academia for research. Plus there’s marketing, paying back your investors, and so on. I mean, how on earth are you going to do all this with only 15% of the total revenue? It’s a hugely expensive process to even keep churning out a drug that’s been approved for years.
Again, in business, you can’t go and spend all your money on R&D. Investors would revolt. You have to show that not only are you innovating, but also doing all the other stuff that it takes to generate revenue. About the only part of the equation that I can see shaving some major money out of is marketing. But again, unless you ban marketing, no single firm is going to just quit shilling on principle. They would get demolished by their competitors.
Also, what makes you think that all researchers in academic labs don’t behave like there is wealth to be made in the private sector? I have laid my own two eyes on many an academic researcher who, upon discovering an economically viable idea, went off and started a company to market it. Where do you think these industry scientists come from, anyway? Where I work, every scientist in my group was once in academia. Some of them have cover-article Science and Cell papers under their belts, and they got into the field because they had ideas worth developing. And we sometimes collaborate with academics who remain in their institutions yet have private interests on the side, in which they have enormous financial stake.
The model you’re proposing is like some kind of biomedical communism: All the good scientists and their supporters work solely for the public good; dicovering, producing, and distributing pharmaceuticals to the whole world at cost. I suppose that’s a fine idea, but in the real world, it most certainly does not work that way.
Plus, not a lot of academic researchers who choose to stay in academia want to do applied research to discover drugs. That’s the whole reason they stay in academia, half the time. They would find the necessity of practical applications far too restrictive; and thank heaven for them, because they can take the risks to find new ideas that capitol investors would never, ever support. Nobody is going to buy stock in a company that does nothing but determine the crystal structure of active vs. inactive G-protein-coupled ionic channels, for instance. Let those people who love to do that stuff and can live with the strenuous rigors of academic science do their job, which is study the world for the sake of studying it.