@xahnegrey40 You're right, it probably costs Bayer well under $100 to make a bottle of Nubeqa.

However, it will have cost far over $1 billion to take Nubeqa through various phases of clinical trials and then regulatory approval in the U.S., EU, UK, Canada, etc. etc. Each bottle of Nubeqa sold has to repay a fraction of those sunk costs, plus a fraction of the cost of the failed drugs that didn't make it through the trials to market, plus a profit for shareholders (Bayer didn't manage a profit in 2025 because of legacy legal and litigation costs, but are optimistic for 2026).

OTOH, it's fair to ask *why* we're relying on Bayer to do this. Since governments around the world are by far the biggest purchasers of drugs like Nubeqa, and the initial discoveries were probably funded by government research grants, OECD countries could get together, fund the trials and regulatory approvals themselves, and cut out the middleman (like they did for the Ebola vaccine a decade ago).

Would it work? Hard to say. But the current system produces meds that are absurdly expensive, even if Bayer's lack of profits in 2025 doesn't reflect that.