We Pay to Dig the Mine. Big Pharma Takes the Gold.

I just watched a clip from Joe Rogan's podcast with Brigham Buhler where they break down what's happening with GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. And I went down the rabbit hole fact-checking everything they said. What I found is honestly kind of insane.

Here's the part that nobody talks about. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that NIH funding contributed to 99.4% of the 356 drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019. That's $187 billion in taxpayer money funding the basic research behind nearly every drug that hit the market in that decade.

For GLP-1 drugs specifically, the story starts with a scientist named Jean-Pierre Raufman who was working at the National Institutes of Health in 1980, testing animal venoms on guinea pig pancreases. Then in the early 1990s, a researcher named John Eng at the Veterans Administration Medical Center discovered a compound in Gila monster venom that mimicked a human hormone. That discovery eventually became the foundation for every GLP-1 drug on the market today, including Ozempic. All of that was publicly funded research.

So here's my analogy. We — the American taxpayers — are paying to dig mines. We fund decades of research, we take on the scientific risk of not knowing if any of it will lead anywhere, and we keep digging until we hit gold. And then when something promising is found, Big Pharma shows up and says "We'll take it from here." They run the clinical trials, get the patents, and charge us $900 to $1,000 a month for a drug that our tax dollars helped discover.

Novo Nordisk now holds 154 patents on semaglutide. The original compound patent was supposed to expire in March 2026, but they've extended exclusivity through December 2031 using what's called a patent thicket — basically filing hundreds of patents on minor modifications to keep competitors out.

And it gets worse. During the Ozempic shortage, the FDA literally asked compounding pharmacies to step in and make the drug to help people who needed it. Those pharmacies were selling it for $100 to $300 a month. Then Novo Nordisk got the FDA to take semaglutide off the shortage list, which legally shut down the compounders, and then filed over 130 lawsuits across 40 states against them.

Oh, and here's the kicker. The government actually has the legal power to fix this. It's called "march-in rights" under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. If a drug was developed using taxpayer-funded research, the government can force the patent holder to license it at a reasonable price. In the 45 years since that law was passed, the government has never used this power. Not once.

So let me get this straight. We fund the research. We take the risk. A company commercializes it, charges us ten times what it costs to make, builds a wall of 154 patents around it, sues anyone who tries to make it cheaper, and the government — which paid for the research in the first place — does nothing.

It seems to me that we, the American people, should be participating in these profits. After all we funded the discovery.

Sources:
- NIH funding for 99.4% of drugs: PNAS, Cleary et al.
- GLP-1 discovery history: WHYY/NPR, PMC
- Novo Nordisk 154 patents: I-MAK
- Patent thicket and exclusivity extension: CSRxP, ACS Chemical and Engineering News
- Compounding pharmacy lawsuits: Drug Discovery Trends, Pharmacy Times
- March-in rights never exercised: JAMA Health Forum, Stanford Law School