In the fall of 2024, Citizen Math released updated versions of every lesson in our library, plus a few new ones! We know you may have already prepped an earlier version or planned a repeat of last year, so we're continuing to make these earlier versions available through Thursday December 5, 2024.
You can find the new lessons through the regular search, and we hope you love them as much as we do. You can read more about these updates in Our Community.
Click here for the updated version of this lesson!
How should pharmaceutical companies decide which drugs to develop? There are plenty of medications for conditions like seasonal allergies and athlete’s foot, but treatments for critical conditions such as Ebola are often non-existent. Even though treatments like these may be more important, they’re also less profitable for drug companies.
In this lesson, students create linear and quadratic functions to explore how much pharmaceutical companies profit from different drugs and consider ways to incentivize companies to prioritize medications that are valuable to society.