R&D includes a lot of (most?) but not all advertising. It probably doesn't include things like running DTC ads on TV. But it does include things like:
- Paying doctors to prescribe the drug to patients for "research purposes."
- Paying doctors for their "valuable opinions" about the drug.
- Paying for advertising to recruit patients into clinical trials.
And so on.
I don't think there are any industry-wide statistics, so you'd have to look at the break down for each individual drug (where available). If you read pretty much any book on the pharma industry it will go into this, there are no shortage that you can find on Amazon.
For the first point you mean clinical trials? I wouldn’t call that advertising.
The 2nd point sounds like consulting fees, not advertising.
And the 3rd point is required to recruit for clinical trials. And the drug doesn’t even have a brand name at the point. Doesn’t seem like what the general public would call advertising.
Usually post approval clinical trials. Since pharma companies wouldn't be allowed to pay doctors to prescribe their drugs for no reason, they just spin up new trials after the drug is already approved and pay doctors in exchange for getting the patients to do something nominal like filling out a survey.
> The 2nd point sounds like consulting fees, not advertising.
Consulting is a form of advertising, at least in the way it's actually done in the pharma industry.
I think the argument is that these activities are done in a specifically disingenuous way that achieves primarily marketing and sales goals rather than R&D goals.
