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Global Access To University-Derived Medicines
Nicholas Stine writes, "Universities should make their patented biomedical innovations accessible to those in poor countries, according to a consensus statement signed by dozens of international global health leaders. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student group active at over 30 universities in North America, drafted the Philadelphia Consensus Statement urging universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries. Notable signatories include 28 non-governmental organizations, four Nobel laureates, Justice Edwin Cameron of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal, Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health."
If we did this, who would invest the Billions necessary to research and produce these drugs? You or I can likely live very happily without worrying too much about money, but corporations cannot create wealth out of thin air. In areas like software, I agree that most patents should be "free and open". In healthcare, patents are what enables drug companies to make enough money to invest in future drugs. Without protection that patents offer drug manufacturers, it is likely that private investment would dwindle to almost nothing, leaving our government (via higher taxes) to pick up the tab (unless you are suggesting we don't need any future drugs or medical devices ... which is an entirely different discussion).
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...everybody signed the declaration except the actual people doing and paying for the drug research.
In other news, Slashdot readers signed a petition for free computers while drivers signed another for free gas.
and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research,
Ok, suppose some compound was discovered which showed some promise as a lead for a cure for cancer. It was 100% government funded. Are you suggesting that 100% of any profits made from the compound be surrendered to the government? Nobody would manufacture it even if every single step of the drug R&D process was completely paid for - even if the pills cost 5 cents to make and sold for $500 dollars you couldn't make a cent from it.
The reality is that when an academic group gets a lead on a possible therapeutic advance, it is often just a proof-of-concept idea, or maybe the discovery of a new pathway or enzyme that might be a target. Sure, this is of tremendous value to discovering a cure for some disease, but much work must be done to actually come up with a drug. Even if a compound cures cancer in mice it will most likely turn out to not work in people, or if it does work it will probably only work with a limited amount of efficacy and only after a lot of tinkering. Once you actually have a decent candidate you can then go ahead and spend a few hundred million dollars to do a clinical trial to find out if it even works.
So, even if you're "just given" the cure for cancer that "freebie" ends up costing you at least a few hudred million dollars (especially if you include the number of other "freebies" that you spent good money on and which didn't pan out). Now you can go ahead and start selling your product, except that since the university that gave the concept to you also gave it to 15 other companies you're in competition right out of the gate. Now, those other 15 companies were a lot smarter - they didn't send a dime on the drug - they just waited to see what the outcome of the clinical trials were. They immediately start selling pills for 20 cents each and make a killing, while the company with hundreds of millions in sunk costs just loses its investment.
If you want to have private industry develop drugs, then you need to reward companies that innovate and spend money on R&D, as opposed to companies that just sit around to reap the rewards of work done by others.
Now, if you want to government fund the ENTIRE drug development process that might be feasible, and then you can just outsource the actual manufacture and get cheap drugs. But there are a few potential drawbacks with this system:
1. You have a single budget for all drug R&D for the nation. That budget tends to get trimmed from time to time (just look at NASA).
2. You don't have much accountability for how that drug R&D money is spent. Expect 50% of it to go to AIDS, of course. Expect about 40% to go to various bureaucrats/preferred-vendors/etc. Right now NIH doesn't have as much of this trouble because its budget is relatively small - when you make it equal to the pharma industry on top of what it does now it will become ripe for corruption.
3. I'm assuming that all this is going to end up being done by the US government, since nobody else seems to do much drug development these days. So, US taxpayers are essentially paying for the world's drug R&D. I'm sure the EU will only be happy to take advantage of the US discoveries though.
4. Scientists working on drug R&D won't get paid nearly as well as they do now, and pay will be based more on seniority than merit (typical govt practice). The best and brightest next generation of potential-scientists will find better things to do with their time.
In any case, there is a simple way to try out government drug R&D without killing the pharma industry. Just create an agency to do the work, and start doing it. When an academic lab is taking bids on a patent the govt could bid and buy the rights for the public, and then develop the drug to completion. Industry would develop some drugs which would be sold under the current system, govt would develop drugs that would be very c