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Patents Choking Off Medical Research
pq writes "The New Republic has an insightful article talking about the
"absence of truly innovative drugs in current drug company pipelines. And the explanation for that might well come from the supposed fount of American innovation: our patent system." Apparently they are trapped in a situation where "it's much easier to argue that `patents support innovation' than to try to explain that some patents are good for innovation while others are bad." A long read, but unlike the latest copy-protected mp3 player, this is definitely stuff that matters!"
OK, so part of this can be tossed off as a little bit of paranoia, but the patent issue is only a small part of the iceberg that is medical research. There is a dearth of substances out there that fight depression (St. Johns Wort), cancer, and other ailments that no-one is willing to put through the rigorous testing required by the AMA, and FDA because there's NO MONEY IN IT. They can't patent it, so as soon as it's approved, anyone can sell it. It's a sad but true fact that it happens all the time. If you're intersted in starting down the road of true paranoia, look at When Healing Becomes A Crime, The Harry Hoxsey Story if you can find it. try here if you're interested
No, it's right on. It's a well-known problem too.
It's not that the drug companies are sitting on the cure.
They're not LOOKING for it. The private money is funneled into drug possobilities that will pay off. Actually, I'm fine with this. Great, we get treatments. But government has to step up and pay the bill for research that benefits "the public good". Markets arn't the perfect solution for everything. In drug/health care, cooperatives that are put improving health above, investment returns are very important.
Think about it. Any companies that put the amount of money towards vaccines etc that was relative to their health care value WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS. Why vaccines aren't profitable. They are one time use (or so). You only get so many years of monopoly anyway. People will (rightly so) riot if you charge $10,000 for a vaccine for polio, which might make it more profitable.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
It's a difficult thing to prove quantitatively (although the market woes and the lack of any new groundbreaker like Viagra and Prozac in the pipeline is mentioned .. did you want that in a pie chart?) .. especially since the questions of what drugs are important, which arn't, whether some drugs are actually better than the problem they cure .. these are not neccessarily quantifiable things.
The thing is, most of the people I know in the scienitific community right now agree with that main charge of this article. Yes, patents are important, but there is a crowing concensus that simply allowing anything and everything to be patented (which is increasingly the case) harms the very industry that patents were put in place to support.
We've become so engrossed in the battle for the pie that we ruined the pie for everybody in the first place. There's plenty to share, so we shouldn't focus so hard on ensuring that yoou'll get your pie. Or in another analogy, if capitalism is people in competition to the finish line, we've gotten so good at tripping each other up and not actually runny that we might as well have all walked the distance.
Yes, there is no quantitative proof, but the way the industry operates, you'd have to wait 5 or 10 years to see the effects that the current research climate has on the consumer end of the industry. So, we have to rely on people in-the-know to identify problems and solutions before we can tally them on a spread sheet.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I tend to agree. There isn't a new arguement here, and none of them hold water.
A good bit of what I read was a poke at the prices of new drugs, and a drop in investment. Well, new drugs are expensive to produce and test thoroughly. There's the expensive research to find a new treatment. Then, there's the expensive and extensive government-mandated testing to make sure the drugs won't do more harm than healing. After that, before the drug can be marketed, it has to be patented... which means telling everyone else how to make it.
And there's only a short time period for the research company to recoup its expenses before the 'generic' drug companies are allowed enter the market... to produce the same drug, without all the R&D costs. If it's an extremely useful drug, you'll hear of people lobbying the government to let the generics start early, cutting in on that short time period the patent-holder has to recoup losses and make enough money to satisfy the investors. And now, you've got more folks wanting the government to step in again and engage in more price-fixing for drugs used by retirees.
Whenever the government limits the odds of receiving return on one's investment, investment will drop. And that applies to the investments of time and effort by drug researchers as well as the financial investments from Wall Street.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Read the article again. They explicitly mention hepatitis research, and Harvard suing over osteoporosis research. Then there's the suggestion that HGS may be able to interfere with AIDS research. And aside from screwing other people, Big Pharma is now trying to squeeze every little bit of life out of existing products for which it has patents (or can get bogus new ones) rather than doing actual innovation.
This isn't *quantitative* evidence, but it doesn't sound like the author just pulled all this out of his ass. And as a biomedical researcher, I assure you there is a huge body of evidence to support the article's assertion which did not appear there.
>Which drug companies are tripping the others up?
.. there comes a time when you're spending so many resources on trying to be competative other than the actual market fitness of your product that you sacrifice the over-all quality of the product being produced. One example: My father, being a principal R&D guy at a pharmaceutical technology company, was involved in patent litigation that delayed the development of a product they were working on. You simply cannot assume that the cost of not enforcing their patent ALWAYS outweigh the costs involved in filing it, defending it, nor preventing other companies from building off of it. You can't predict the future, either, which means that theres no way to actually prove that had you not filed/enforced a patent, you wouldn't be better off for it.
.. some patents are getting in the way of the very goal (to create better drugs) they are supposed to encourage. I have never met anybody in science who doesn't recognize that you can have too much of a good thing when it comes to patents. So then its just a matter of, like I said, figuring out the point where people are spending more time/money trying to defend what they have instead of using that time and money to do what they are chartered to do.
s/tripping/patent-litgation
So, effectively, you're saying this entire article is BS. Which I assume means that you believe that the actual granting, defence, and enforcement of patents can only be good, regardless of the situation, whats be patented, whos patenting it. It can only help humanity, right? All patents. More patents! More!
No
Tripping each other up doesn't imply illigal action, it implies exactly what the article implies
"Old man yells at systemd"