Slashdot Mirror
British Columbia Bows To Breast Cancer Patent
dlek writes "Bowing to pressure from Utah's Myriad Genetics, the government of British Columbia has stopped offering a test for hereditary breast cancer. The price of the test, which looks at two genes responsible for the cancer, has tripled to $3500US. Our public health care system can't afford to pay so we're sending people to Ontario, which is ignoring the patent. People are disappointed we're not doing the same... previous Slashdot mentions are on their original claim and on the Curie Institute's challenge to the patent."
Canada's pinko health system (which I refuse to live without) colliding with our grasping new capitalism (which I also refuse to live without - although I'm embarrassed by it...)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Wouldn't the fact that women's cells have been duplicating those genes for thousands of years count as previous art?
Aparently not...
So what they patent the gene, I'm not copying it, or even using it (by choice), I'm just checking to see if it is there.
Since when is it a violation of a patent to see if the patented "invention" is located in a certain area?
Now if the patent is for a specific test to check for that gene, as opposed to the gene itself, that would make sense, but the articles seam not to point it that way.
I hope my government wises up and just disallows the patenting of preexisting 'inventions'
I wrote Larry Combest a few months ago complaining about the whole Berman thing. The form letter he sent back went on and on about how important intellectual property such as copyrighted media, trademarks, and PATENTS are to the economy, business, and corporate health of the nation.
Okay, Larry, Here's a real good example of how patents are HURTING health for our beer-loving neighbors to the north.
Yeah, we'll pay to bail out a company that's committed felonies, but we won't pay extra so that some poor woman can have protect her healthy by having breast-cancer screeings. Fuckwits.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is the kind of issue that cries for a flamatory public debate.
On one side, the right to cure and get cured at a reasonable cost or, even, any expense.
On the other, right right to maintain a certain cash flow from products who carry a usually very expensive R&D cycle.
Patents on medical products are a touchy subject.
I think the pharmaceutical world needs a new kind of patent protection system. Something that allows any company, by law, to produce the covered material by a patent, but forcing them to return some royalties for the duration of the patent.
In other words, legally allow copying of patented products but enforcing a royalty payment to the inventor of the product.
This way, big research companies can be assured that their investments are covered, and patients are assured they'd get access to the care they require.
I never much liked the need for the idea of intellectual property (although I'm hard-pressed to come up with an alternate system that'll work as well on the whole), but somehow when we're talking about lives rather than Napster and hearing the same exact story from the people who 'own' the IP (we just wouldn't have the incentive to produce if we don't have total control) it makes the whole idea sound pretty dumb.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
From one perspective, this test wasn't available a few years ago. A company spent the money and time to make it available, and now they want a return on their investment. If it was a new method of toasting bread, we wouldn't care...
but it's breast cancer detection/prevention so it's not "business" anymore. The question is: where is (or can there be) a happy balance between the pharmaceuticals screwing us, and us screwing them?
-... ---
Nice to know that your life means absolutely nothing to the economy, business, and corporate health of the nation.
If everyone had to take even one day off all at once for cancer treatments, IP would count for shit. Why can't these people see this?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Slightly related news? I turned on Bloomberg this AM and found the president discussing generic prescription drugs and how the drug companies are abusing the stay process in order to maintain a hold on the drug going generic. If he's starting to look at the generic-ization of meds, perhaps it's the tip of the iceberg for things such as this.
Disclaimer: I'm a right-winger, but dunno about this idea.. after all drug companies do take finantial risks to make new medications. But holding potential benefits for people's health over their head in the name of pure profit bothers me. Like the Microsoft stuff, it possibly sets a bad precedent.. I hate m$' heavy-handed tactics but having the government step in seems a bad idea.
-fester
-'fester
I've been thinking twice now about donating money to HIV or breast cancer research. I think I've heard of many cases were people supported these programs but when the research was complete, a patent was assigned to the final product. The research that received our support is going to make someone billionaire. You guys are talking about Canada. Think about countries like India, Argentina, etc. These are countries that are in very bad shape. They can't afford paying the high cost of these treatments in US dollars. Is there any kind of law that prevents research programs that were supported by donations to patent their final program? Wouldn't it be considered unethical to say the least?
So these guys pretend to be above God and/or Nature and pretend ownership of their Creation...
Interesting to see this thing coming from traditionally religious Utah... Is anyone tryng to create a new religion of The Chosen who can afford the Patented Creation that offers the Misteries of Human Genes capable to prolong Patented Life and improve Patented Health just for a miserable sacrifice of a few thousands? While The Patented Infidels will be forced to avoid touching their Patented Ills so they can meet their Patented Destiny, as they don't have a penny to pay the humble sacrifice, that is the wish of being humans?
cancer.
Fair is fair. They want the profits from testing for the gene, they should pay the costs if the gene ends up causing cancer in a patient.
What is really outrageous is that these jerks learned about the gene and how to test for it using PUBLIC tax monies, then they split into 'private' industry, file patents and start gouging - exploiting. This couldn't happen if some congressional pockets weren't being lined in the first place.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Hopefully someone will get around to suing because the "patent" is killing them.
So folk get all wound up about a US company exercising a patent right in a developed country that can afford to pay. This has been going on in Third world for twenty years with very little comment until the cost of AIDs drugs hit the news.
It is not just the people who will die because the western drug companies refuse to sell drugs at affordable prices. There is no guarantee that epidemics (AIDS is now a pandemic) will stay there and not cross to the developed world. Perhaps that is the drug co executives plan, Enron style to keep the diseases going so they can sell the drugs.
Of course the US is not above hypocrisy here. During the Anthrax scare Sen. Biden craftily proposed that the US seize the patent rights to cipro and mandate the production of generics. Congress quickly agreed. I have no doubt that Biden knew about the controversy over AIDS drugs and used the anthrax scare to deliberately cut the legs out from under the drug companies claims just before a crucial conference.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Sorry, Myriad Genetics, and any other clown who thinks they own the patent to the design of my body. Just because you reverse engineered a few portions of that design does not mean that you now control whether I can look at it or not. I think some massive civil disobedience on this whole patent issue and so called IP is in order until we get some politicions in place who can fix the present corrupt system.
Yes. In Canada healthcare is provided by the provinces, based on federal grants on a yearly basis. Public opinion polls regularly show it to be the strongest supported social benefit provided in Canada. Unfortunately we're trying to provide health care in CAD $ but based on US technology, so our dollar exchange is hurting our adoption of new technology. Also, we've had problems in the past of high quality surgeons fleeing to the US since their rates are capped by the federal government since they're guaranteed salary.
Some things are not covered, like optional surgey, medications, and some quality-of-life coverage. However, other social agencies can provide support to those truly in need (although even these a struggling).
I believe national health coverage is our biggest expense, even coming ahead of defense, education, and infrastructure.
Lots of national debate on allowing privitisation of some sectors. People are afraid that this will result in 2-tier health care. Other ideas are charging nominal service fees to curb abuse (e.g. $5 a doctor's visit). For people with wealth, they have the option of going to the US to short-cut long lines for specialised service, especially relating to cancer therapy. In some cases as a Canadian citizen you are eligible for some compensation.
By no means a perfect system, but I prefer it to alternatives in other countries such as England and the US. I'd rather spend 30% of our GDP on healthcare than on a military budget.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
You can view it here.
It sounds like it patents both a method and a gene... but being that I no nothing about modern genetics, I can even being to analyze if the more important part of the patents is a novel method, or just a bunch of chemical sequences (which are listed).
_sig_ is away
How about a compromise? Any researcher finding a mechanism of disease inherent within a genetic sequence can patent the sequence and receive no more than $100 per test for the diseased genes.
Or, if that amount is too low for some of the more esoteric diseases (which will not be often tested), how about a sliding scale?
We should have some legislative mechanism in place to reduce the maximum payout per test as the number of tests performed rises.
It is absolutely unreasonable to grant an exclusive patent on my genetic function (and I assume that men carry this gene sequence as well, even if it is inactive) without my personal consent. If the drug companies refuse to compromise on this issue, then they should expect wholesale disregard for their patents, as is proving to be the case.
So essentially you're saying there is a vas deferens between the way male and female patients are treated? That's just nuts.
example.org - powered by Linux!
One can patent an invention, such as a method of detecting a disease, but one cannot patent a discorvery, such as the function of a gene or an island, planet or anything such.
Thus is the mentioned patent a load of crap and can happily be ignored! (IMHO)
acctually, canada only spends 8% of it's GDP on healthcare(the U.S. spend 12%)
It certainly isn't free, I'm in a ~40% tax bracket.
... that is an asinine reason to perpetuate the existing, severely broken system which is clearly designed to serve the few and priveleged, subsidized by higher costs for the rest of us.
I'm in a 40% tax bracket in the United States, and my employer pays for my health care insurance, which isn't nearly as good as what I had in Germany when I was working as a college intern (the money my employer pays for health insurance would likely be mine as income otherwise, so it wouldn't be at all unfair to add that to my tax bracket for a more even ocmparison, in which case the United States taxes would come out vastly more expensive than most, if not all, of the industrialized world. We pay three times what the rest of the world does for comparable healthcare).
If you look at tax rates based upon what you earn, Germany (and likely Canada, though I haven't compared the numbers myself for Canada yet) has about the same tax rate as the United States for anyone earning wages in the middle to upper-middle income brackets. Yes, if you make $500,000 or $1,000,000 / year you'll pay much higher taxes in Germany (and probably Canada) than you do in the US, but how many people does that affect, and just how impoverished are the lifestyles of those so affected. Not as impoverished as the upper middle income bracket folks, who pay roughly the same in both countries, but get a hell of a lot more for their tax dollar in Germany than they do the United States. Woopty-fucking-do if Joe Corporate Exec can't afford a second yacht this year
What is amazing to me is how utterly myopic we Americans are when it comes to socialized medicine. The insurance and pharmaceutical companies tell us how poorly socialized medicine works, citing one or two anectdotes (for which there are a dozen anectdotes making exactly the opposite point), but no hard evidence that socialized medicine a la Europe (including Germany's highly regulated medical insurance industry, the system Hilary Clinton wanted to emulate), and we as a people buy it hook, line, and sinker merely because anything having the dirty word "socialism" in it must be worse than the current 40% uninsured population we have now.
Not all that goes to health care, of course, but a good chunk does. Do I dislike the taxes? Yes. Would I want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system? Not on your life.
Amen. The irony is, I doubt your taxes are all that much higher than ours, if at all. We get to pay taxes to prop up Worldcom, line the pockets of Baby Bush and his cronies, and invade small middle-eastern countries at the behest of our oil moghuls instead. And we're told we should be 'proud' to be Americans. Feh.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
didn't you understand?> So my question is, is this totally a patent issue?
What part of
> Instead, is this problem a little bit of both. A jacked-up patent royalties to recoup R&D, and a brand of health care system stressed because of its communal nature?
That's it, blame it on the socialists.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Or never alter them and assume its the best way. Equally moronic and myopic view.
What frusterates me is that the *most* amount of groundwork for drug research is done by universities. Pharmaceutical companies fund the commercialization and last mile research.
But yeah, I guess we'd be without viagra and zoloft without the generous, risky investments pharmaceutical companies do into research.
Seriously, the private sector is so full of itself, it frequently forgets where the real research comes from before its obvious that said research will turn into a mad phat money cow. Any industry which can be found guilty of price-fixing over and over and over again doesn't sound to me like an industry which needs (or for that matter, deserves) Fort-Knox like protection of its intellectual assets.
"Old man yells at systemd"
This company has already caused trouble for other researchers within the US. For those who would suggest that if there were no profit incentive this "innovation" of discovering a gene wouldn't have happened I suggest you read this MSNBC article, which contains the following two paragraphs:
In Philadelphia, a university stopped testing 700 women a year for a genetic predisposition to breast cancer because its lab was accused of violating a biotechnology company's patents.
"I'm quite disgusted," said Arupa Ganguly at the University of Pennsylvania, who abandoned years of breast cancer research after Myriad Genetics Inc. warned her in 1999 that she was trespassing on the company's intellectual property. "My work went down the drain."
The fact is that this company just got to a position 1 or 2 years before University researchers would have. While there still may have been a patent put on this information by the University somehow I doubt you would have to pay extortionist fees to do anything related with those genes even if it's just further research by universities.
Americans have already been suffering because of this insane idea that a gene that occurs within every human can become the sole property of a single for profit company. It falls within the government's responsibility to prevent this situation from happening but for that to occur you need a government that is "for the people" not for corporate profits.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
Actually, as I understand it, drugs are one of the major expenditures in any healthcare system, including Canada's. The fact is, people with serious illnesses can incur many thousands of dollars per year on drugs alone. Of course, this is where generics would come to the rescue, but, as we've seen, with patent life extending and companies finding loopholes in patent law, this isn't fool proof, AND forces people who can't afford new drugs to be ten years behind the times in disease treatment.
For anyone boggling at how much Canada spends on health care (and realizing that 30% isn't the correct figure), you should know that here in the U.S. we spend roughly twice as much per-capita as the Canadians on health care (through insurance premiums, instead of taxes). The problem is that our system is so bogged down in inefficiency, that we're losing 50 cents on the dollar to middlemen. If we cut out the middlemen and maintained the same level of spending, we'd have a health system that'd put the Canadians to shame. And isn't that what it's all about? :)
The enemies of Democracy are
On the contrary. Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties? How will this encourage research? Money drives the world for a reason. Now I admit that $3500 to test for a certain gene is quite steep, but we do not know how much money was put-forth to determine the offending genes.
If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future! This applies to drug companies as well. Sure we pay steep prices for them, but an enourmous amount of money goes into their development.
Now on another note, the Canadian health system has much worse problems than this patent issue. If my mother/father died of cancer and I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500. Hell, people pay more money for lasic surgery but bad eyesight will never kill you.
I quote:
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
What blows me away about the defenders of this patent is that they seem to believe a company should be able to recoup their costs in any way possible, including expropriating ownership of a person's genetic code without his/her knowledge or consent. Myriad effectively owns a pair of genes (and genes covered under 98 other patents) found in millions of people for the next couple of decades. You can't offer your own breast cancer genes for testing and research, because under a broken patent law, you don't own them. This is the entire reason this testing has to be stopped; Myriad apparently has the legal right to tell people whether they can even look for these genes or not. You don't control the right to use them and provide them to others as you see fit, so no dice giving your tissue for a university for cancer research.
To reiterate: it's not as if Myriad simply patented the testing itself. It patented a gene that is clearly not a unique configuration of matter (found in part of patent law as a way for companies to patent things like molecules), since it's obviously found in millions of people - otherwise, it would be useless as part of a test. They have claimed ownership over a part of millions of people; it may "only" be a gene or two, but this company is using their authority over it to block any kind of testing or research using it. Talk about stifling innovation... it's arguable that this company has effectively stolen a person's ownership over their own genes.
If a government claimed ownership of part of your genetic code and said you couldn't get a certain test without ponying up big money to Big Brother, I bet the people saying "but the company has to recoup their costs" would go into conniptions about a government cash-grab and Big Brother, rightfully.
Go ahead, tell me all about the millions pharmaceuticals pour into research, and how they simply must be compensated... fine. Patent a test. Patent a device used to find the gene. Don't put people into a situation where they discover they don't have control over their own bodies anymore, can't offer their own tissue for testing and research because they don't have the right to something they were born with. Profit is not a right that overrides all other rights, and it doesn't justify, what is effectively, theft of property rights from millions of people to one entity so it can make money.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
>I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500
Because you _have_ $3500, dumbass. If you were a millionaire, I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem plunking down 500$ for toothpaste every night too.
> Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties?
Said it before, say it again. Most of the groundwork for these discoveries are done using your and my public tax money at universities. Companies research the last mile when they sniff money, and then lock the 'exclusivity' of the test/drug down with a patent. Its a joke. Patents didn't exist years ago, and that didn't prevent humans from discovering new things.
The way people like you talk, scientists and inventors never existed before pay cheques. What a load of hooey.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Yeah, it's not like any truly innovative discovery or method would result is being paid big lecture fees, possible Nobel Prize nominations, textbook royalties, or anything. Especially in the areas of deadly diseases, right? Yeah, of all the biology and med students I've met throughout college, none of them ever had the desire to cure/detect a disease that killed a best friend or family member -- they simply wanted to own new home in the burbs, with a 4-car garage and have a SUV in eash stall.
It's bloody greed (on a corporate level, more likely, than a personal scientist one), plain and simple. I was driving to work about a year ago and listening to NPR. One of the quick news blurbs was that some huge drug company's board had decided to can all further research on treatment for some really bad disease (multiple sclerosis, I think). Why? Because one of the patents on the process was about to expire!
"Mr. chairman, I vote we stop all research into this horrible, degenerative disease because we won't be able to recoup our costs. No, the fact that our Viagra clone and hair regeneration products will cover the costs tenfold -- we need to spend that money on TV commercials and free samples to physicians."
Method of processing duck feet