[MrWookie]

Shake,

[ QUOTE ]
For one, it can keep it secret.

[/ QUOTE ]

For the most part, this is a fallacy. Any self-respecting analytical chemist should be able deduce the structure of any drug in a fairly short time frame. You stick it in an NMR spectrometer, maybe you enlist the help of a mass spectrometer, a Raman spectrometer, or a number of other structure determination techniques, and bam, you know what the drug is in shockingly little time, and with equipment any self-respecting pharma company already has. Hell, even if you have to crystallize the SOB in order to get a structure, there are some extremely efficient, high-throughput techniques that can do that for you. Next, you enlist a team of organic chemists to hammer out the synthesis, and you're in business. It's almost certain that, once the synthesis is solved, the big pharma will have more efficient and larger scale production process than a small company that actually discovers the drug. If this whole process took months to years time, then conceivably the little guy would be able to get in there, get enough brand recognition, and get the word out so that people choose his product over the copy (Advil vs. Ibuprofen, etc.). However, we're talking weeks to months here for a team dedicated to solving and synthesizing one molecule. That's well within the range of big pharma's large marketing coffers to catch up with. The only strategy for the discoverer would be to stockpile huge quantities of the drug (assuming it's stable for that long) without announcing its existence (and hoping no corporate spies from big pharma caught wind of the clinical trials) until he has enough to sell all at once so as to make sufficient profit before our big guy catches up. At that point, he gives up and finds something new.

In a battle of equally large companies, sure, the one that gets there first will be able to have a secure market advantage, but the incentive for the little guy to enter the market and try to compete with a new drug is minimal.