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Stem Cell Patent Torpedoes Research
g8orade writes: "This story says the University of Winsconsin owns patents that may prevent anyone spending that federal money soon. "As they carry out President Bush's plan for government financing of embryonic stem cell studies, federal health officials confront a daunting challenge: U.S. patent 6,200,806, a claim to the human embryonic stem cell." Originally in the NYT, this is a link to the not free account-requiring Charlotte Observer."
The patent
by the isolation of ES cell lines from two primate species, the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) and the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta).
-- the patent It looks like he might have been looking to patent embryonic stem cells of those species of primates, not human stem cells.
Do you like German cars?
Where did you get the idea that the patent was directed to a naturally occuring cell? It isn't.
Research at the Montreal Neurological Institute has revealed that there is an alternative source for stem cells. The source is from the skin of adult rodents, and they believe that this will also be possible with humans. The added advantage is that these stem cells would not be rejected when used in building organs for replacement.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So why would anyone keep using embryonic stem cells?
Here's a link to another story in the Capital Times (in Madison, Wisconsin). It puts more emphasis on interviews with researchers at the WARF. They claim that they are being very responsible with a patent, far more so than a private corporation would be if it owned the patent.
Unfortunately, the practice of licensing out research to private corporations has become common practice at the University of Wisconsin and other big research universities. Grad students sometimes do the work on research where the company gets to keep all IP gained from the research.
The problem is that the state keeps cutting our funds every year, so the university constantly has to search for new sources of funding. The administration sees private companies as a source for this research money. However, the gain from private grants, etc., is often offset by the expenses the UW incurs by building new facilities for this corporate-owned research. We still end up footing huge bills, but then the public doesn't own the result.
The researchers do have a point: at least a university research institution owns this patent, and they are concerned with the benefits of research, not profiteering. Many patents from university research now go to corporations. For example, earlier this year some UW researchers were given "free" access to Third Wave Technologies' proprietary Invader OS in exchange for promising Third Wave the right to develop any discoveries, which I assume means pursuing patents based on the UW researchers' work.
Nonsense. Patents make it possible for corporations to create life-saving technology and saves lives. Pharmaceutical companies raise capital from the marketplace for research and development and regulatory testing, not because shareholders are happy to volunteer funds for R&D, but because they hope the company will make a profit. If the company could not make a profit, the R&D and development wouldn't get done, and the products would be brought to market. If the company didn't have patents, competitors would simply free-ride on the R&D and compete with them using their own work. No profits, no product, no life saving drugs.
Life saving drugs, such as tetracycline and a host of antibiotics, leukemia fighting drugs, and lifestyle preserving drugs such as Prozac and many others are the product of, not deterred by, the patent system.
Of course you're right, so far as life-saving drugs are really developed solely by privately-financed R&D. The reality, however, is very different.
Indeed, a recent study found that, for the top 5 best-selling drugs currently on the market, fully 80% of the money which funded their development was put up not by the pharmacutical companies which own the patents, not by private investors, but by the federal government in the form of research grants. More generally (and for which I can find a link to back me up), between 70 and 90 percent of important drugs are developed with significant government help, and a whopping 38% of all health-care related R&D is financed by the federal government. (Government grants are heavily skewed towards basic research; thus we can expect that this displaces drug discovery research much more than eg. engineering type R&D for new technology in hospitals.) All the government gets back for their tremendous investment (other than a healthier society, which, of course, is their main goal), is a $50 patent fee.
Obviously pharmacuticals still spend a tremendous amount of capital and incur large risks to take the final steps to bring a drug to market and test its safety and efficacy. (The government grants go more to the basic research end of things.) Indeed, you are right in suggesting that the current "free-market" drug development system would completely collapse if pharmacutical companies did not have the monopoly profits of patents to cover their capital investments. Nor could the system survive without government grants at their current, tremendous levels; while the pharmacuticals are certainly not struggling to keep afloat at the moment, their profit rewards are generally commensurate to the risks they incur from the share of development they actually do finance.
What you should realize, however, is that the current system is not a free-market at all. It is so heavily subsidized as to transcend mere "corporate welfare"; instead it is really a huge socialist enterprise with a quasi-capitalist front-end tacked on. The solution, as impossible as it is obvious, is to remove the privatized delivery system and let the entire drug development pipeline be financed, and controlled, by government and academia. In other words, let science for the public good be run by scientists and the public, and not by businessmen.
Thing is, as every developed country in the world except the US has realized, our ethical conception of medicine inherently clashes with capitalist motives. There are only two ways for an entity to profit from offering health care:
1) by killing poor people.
2) by being a broad enough entity that it can reap the benefits of providing health care without charging for it.
#1 is obvious if you think about it for a while: if you charge the rate which the market will bear for live-saving treatments, then obviously some people will be unable to pay. If you think this does not go on in America today then you are very badly deluded.
#2 refers to the fact that having a healthy population is essential for economic growth and a stable society. However, hospitals and pharmacutical companies are not broad enough to benefit from the fact that healthy people can provide a net economic positive while sick or dead people cannot. Our current system has a cobbled-together kludge to fix this: most people's health costs are borne by their employer, who *does* reap (some of) the economic and social benefit of them being healthy.
The problem with this is that it only works for people who are currently employed in a job good enough to pay benefits. The 50 million uninsured in America are mainly young people--children, students, and those with entry level jobs. The economic and societal benefit they will provide later in their lives is often contingent on their remaining healthy today, but the current system can't recognize this.
This is without even getting into the problems of the very poor: of the one-in-five children under 5 years old who lives beneath the povery line; of the mentally ill homeless who could provide a positive benefit to society if they could only recieve treatment. (Less than 50% of those below the poverty line recieve Medicaid, and it rarely provides more than emergency room care; a full 36% are completely uninsured, and thus obviously unable to pay for any medical care whatsoever. Uninsured In America, pg. 22, very large pdf.)
The current system is completely broken, but it will take more than just patent reform to fix it
Yeah, that Jonas Salk sure was one corporate whore. And awful folks like Tishler, Conover and Sheehan, damn those antibiotics. Who needed them? I'm sure they would have made it to all those poor people eventually.
The question is whether Salk et. al. would only have made their discoveries if their research was funded by a private company, as opposed to if they worked eg. at a research university and their research was funded by the university and government grants. I can't conceive of a reason why there would be any difference. I'm certainly not aware of any suggestion that Salk was motivated by the promise of monopoly patents rather than a desire to save millions of children's lives.
Now, the question you have to answer is this: what if Salk et. al. had their own companies, and prevented anyone else in the world from developing killed virus vaccines, or antibiotics, for the 17 year patent period? Back in the 50's, only the vaccines or antibiotics themselves were patentable. If invented today, the entire fields of killed virus vaccines and synthetic antibiotics would likely be signed off on by the USPTO.
By the by, you might be interested to know that Jonas Salk didn't patent the polio vaccine. Incidentally, he is a national hero.
By contrast, Lloyd Conover wasted 27 years of his life defending his tetracyclene patent in court. For his efforts, he got inducted into the USPTO Hall of Fame. (As were Tishler and Sheehan. Salk, as mentioned above, did not merit an invite.)
Incidentally, I had never heard of Lloyd Conover before in my life.