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.