Brazil Breaks Patent to Make AIDS Drug

Andy Tai writes: "In this CNN story, Brazil decides to break a patent over an AIDS drug for public benefits. Brazil will produce the drug domestically without agreements with patent holder, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche. Brazil's efforts to fight AIDS have been praised internationally, and it successfully prevented the US Government from bringing complaints in the WTO on behalf of the drugs industry. This may set an important example that public needs justify the disregard of patent protection." There's another article in the Boston Globe about the decision.

Comments

Re:Way to fucking GO!!

[Bobo the Space Chimp]

> These pharmaceutical companies are turning over
> _billions_ every year, making bucketloads of cash
> out of other people's misery.

Making bucketloads of cash ENDING other people's misery, which is more than you, or Hillary, or others are doing.

Funny how greedily searching for solutions to others' miseries, miseries that those suffering pray for a solution to, solves those problems all the while people stand on rocks pontificating how evil that process is. Yet when you look in their socialist bag, you don't see too much at all.

Re:Example?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"for example, it's taken for granted that people *will* work without compensation on many things, e.g. Open Source software."

Announcing the release of OpenAntiHystX 0.2b:

BECAUSE THE DRUG IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE DRUG, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE DRUG "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE DRUG IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE DRUG PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY MEDICAL TREATMENT OR FUNERAL COSTS.

What's new in 0.2b:

• Removed a protein group that caused some people who're allergic to peanuts to enter anaphylactic shock, with potentially lethal consequences. Thanks to the widow of Jerry Henderson for reporting this.
• The specified manufacturing process was resulting in residual benzene being left in approximately 4% of the pills in each batch. Temporary workaround applied (testing each pill) until we can come up with a permanent fix.
• I've set up a paypal account so people can contribute to the FDA approval cost fund. It's still a long way off, but we should probably start saving up now.
• I've had several people mail me about abdominal cramps. MAKE SURE YOU'RE USING THE LATEST VERSION. The abdominal cramp issue was fixed, along with several other bugs, back in release 0.2a.
• After several round-table discussions with both RMS and the FDA, we've been able to agree that the licensing clause requiring development forks to use a substantially different name (so as to avoid consumer confusion) is acceptable within the Free Drug tenets.

2 Billion R&D == 5 Billion profit

[slashkitty]

Just take a look at their profit statement:


http://www.roche.com/home/investor/inv-finance/i nv -sales-key-figures-hy-2001.htm

They are pulling in cash hand over fist. Now, why couldn't they negotiate a lower price w/ Brazil so that wouldn't send half their budget to Roche?

Re:Drugs for Profit

[GregWebb]

This is a serious post, not a troll, not flamebait but I'm still fishing out the asbestos modem.

Uncomfortable a truth as this is, it only highlights the fundamental problem of capitalist research. When (a category of) research into improving the human situation is only carried out by capitalist organisations, that research is inevitably going to be targetted around the needs of those most able to pay for the end result. Who, let's be honest, aren't going to be the greatest possible recipients of research to improve the human situation.

Now, AIDS research is very important. Partly due to the massive third world AIDS pandemic (except, oops, they can't afford the drugs...) and partly due to generic research intro retrovirii. But think about what could happen if the money put into various other bits of research was spent on, for examples, cholera, river blindness, malaria, measles and so on. I'm not going to provide examples of possible targets for the money to come from, that's just going to get emotive.

Think about it, though. If medical research was primarily (or entirely) funded by society as a whole as opposed to by the proceeds of research then, in theory, we wouldn't have this problem. While it remains a part of a capitalist system it is inevitable.

I'm not a communist (Honest! Capitalism has its uses and the people have a right to choose!) but it's difficult to escape the conclusion that this sort of case exposes the limitations of capitalism rather starkly.

Re:This is an excellent thing to cheer

[Harmast]

So are every other form of patent that grants government enforced monopolies and undermines the very free market upon which our economies depend. There are other ways to finance expensive R&D besides grantintg 20 year monopolies and allowing said monopolies to extort exhorbitant prices from dying people and leaving millions of less fortunates to die (or extorting payment from their impoverished governments).

Really?

I would love to hear how. Outside of the government being the only source of R&D I fail to see how it would work in the drug industry.

The standard arguement against patents is it is cheaper for me to just buy it from you than to figure out how to make it. The time to re-engineer is enough to recoup initial costs and be competitive. An inventor who does not patent does not have to open his design to the public leaving any potential competitors to complete re-engineering.

For many industries this is arguably true. Reverse engineering complex machinery (both physical and virtual) takes time and money that are often better spent on leap-frogging ahead instead of just catching up.

However, a drug is, in the end, a chemical. Once isolated and make into a medicinal form it is relatively simple to identify it. That is assuming that you need to.

You don't, however, because the chemical and lots of stuff about it are public record and would be even if there was no patent. Why? FDA testing.

The real R&D cost of drugs is not research (identifying) but development, specifically all the human and clinical testing needed. This is not a simple or short process and extends from an experimenters first idea to full scale drug tests.

FDA regs require specific notekeeping requirements in the labs while isolating and synthesizing(see any good book on technical writing for an outine, if it does not have an experimental notebook procedures appendex or it is not a good one). This process continues throughout the process.

Human trials are not just X people with the target disease. The first step is dose a healthy volunteer and take vitals and blood work after 15 minutes. Then an hour. Then a day later. Then try a new dose. Months or years of these human toxicity tests preceed double blind testing for affectiveness.

At each step the drug can fail thus wasting all money to that point.

Thus isolating the drug, which is the effort a copycat does, is the least part of drug costs. The patent is there to repay these efforts and failed ones on the way.

Does this increase costs to the public during the patent period? Of course, because, as you point out a patent is a monopoly which does not set fair prices in the market sense (markets require multiple independent sellers and buyers to set prices). However, as the market sets fair prices it also weeds out inefficient producers. In a pure market enviroment jumping through the FDA's hoops will always be economically inefficient, thus an intelligent drug company manager will let the other companies do R&D and just copy their efforts.

The problem comes when all drug companies get smart. In these case the patent makes sense because government is granting a limited legal exclusiveness to those who make the expenditures to statisfy a government requirement that is the largest part of the drug price.

If you want to get rid of drug patents I would recommend getting rid of the FDA or require the FDA to pay the costs of testing.