Yes. Thank you.
We were talking before about the cost of research. They are different costs from when I was a grad student. My research was basic medical science. I was basically a lab rat for three years—test tubes, centrifuges, years of plodding work to generate some numbers that may or may not mean something.
If I had come out with a molecule and said, “Hey, this could be really useful,” I would have done the cheapest part of the research. To take an interesting effect in an animal or a cell membrane model and turn it into a workable medication that's actually going to improve or save lives is of course the real big-ticket item. The gold standard is a randomized clinical trial of 10,000-plus patients. Those are very expensive.
We had a witness last meeting who said that we needed to be doing more population-based research. Although that's a little different from what I'm getting at, this is what we are leaving for private industry to do because it's so expensive. They have the resources to invest in this, and of course, again, they're a business. They're not a charity. They want to make up their investment, so they charge a lot of money, and they want extended patents for this.
Now, if we were investing more public money in universities and the universities were performing these large, 10,000-plus randomized clinical trials, would this lower prices and improve access to medications?