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Report Says Patents Prevent New Drugs
An anonymous reader writes "Current orthodoxy claims patents encourage innovation, by allowing developers to enjoy profitable monopolies on their inventions which in turn inspire them to create new inventions. A new report by the non-partisan General Accounting Office suggests that this orthodoxy is wrong — at least when drug companies are involved. According to the report, existing patent law allows drug companies to patent, and make substantial profits off of, "new" drugs which differ little from existing medicines. Given high profit margins on very minor innovations, the report argues that drug companies have little incentive to produce innovative new drugs. In other words, current patent law actually discourages drug companies from producing new medicines.
Responding to the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a strongly worded statement suggesting that a legislative response will be forthcoming. "The findings in this new GAO report," said Senator Durbin, "raise serious questions about the pharmaceutical industry claims that there is a connection between new drug development and the soaring price of drugs already on the market. Most troubling is the notion that pharmaceutical industry profits are coming at the expense of consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer new drugs.""
I realize that making drugs (or any other product, for that matter) requires research and testing, etc., and manufacturers need to recoup that money spent. Plus, profits from a block-buster drug go into funding expensive research on drugs that can only target a very small portion of the population. However, making tiny changes to an existing drug and calling it "new" sucks, unless the change actually has an effect on how the drug works or reduces a side-effect.
Having said all that, maybe there should be a patent peer review board (or, in government speak, the PPRB) that reviews the validity of a patent request. Maybe patents should be harder to get and you should really have to prove your stuff is unique. After some of the vague, hand-waving tech patents, I've read, it's obvious that the guys in the government reviewing these things don't have a clue.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
I for one am super thankful for me-too drugs. I have been through 4 iterations of basically the "same" drug for my condition. The first one caused a lot of awful side effects, and stopped working for me after awhile. The next few variations of the same thing (5-aminosalicyclic acid (5-ASA) were more effective and had no side effects. I was diagnosed with my condition about 14 years ago, and these little innovations have made all the difference.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
For example, in a recent press release they write:
By allowing the pharmaceutical companies to keep their prices artificially high, the patent system kills people every day, particularly in third world countries. And it's completely unnecessary.The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.
We can look at the numbers for Novartis, Pfizer or AstraZeneca.
They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.
So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.
The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system. Many others have suggested other alternatives.
But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing. In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product. Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Of course, All of that only makes sense if Congress is competent and not corrupt... so much for that then.
groupthink: It's good for self-esteem.
> One example is Claritin vs. Clarinex. (Both are anti-histamines that don't cause drowsiness in most people). Claritin was a cash cow for Schering-Plough whose patent expired a few years ago. It used to be prescription-only and the cost used was around $1 a pill. Now you can buy 300-ct bottles over-the-counter at CostCo for ~ $10.00.
> Enter Clarinex, which Schering claims is certified for both indoor and outdoor allergies. Once again, it's a prescription-only medication with high prices. The punch line: Clarinex is exactly the same drug as Claritin after Claritin passes through your liver once.
And even if Clarinex were better, they'd have no reason to release it until the Claritin patent expired. In fact, they'd have good reason not to release it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The split between the private sector profit motive and directed research into cures doesn't need to be as drastic as you've suggested. One approach that shows promise is for governments - or NGOs - to offer 'pull funding', similar to the X-Prize scheme. The state, or whoever, says "here's a big pile of money, we'll give it to anyone who can come up with a cure for AIDS/H5N1/toe gunk and give us the patent". That way, you get all the benefits of a free market - anyone can compete to come up with a solution - combined with an element of directed, central, planning.
Here in Wales, we have something called the Technium Project. The idea is to have a set of buildings each dedicated to a particular technological field. They are filled with business incubator units (which are expensive, but quite easy to get subsidy for). The idea is that putting all of these businesses close to each other leads to sharing of ideas.
One of the buildings in the project is called the BioTechnium, and is intended for biotech start-ups. Since the building came online, only one person has been employed in it; the building manager. In spite of the fact that it was designed with biotech in mind (decontamination and isolation facilities, etc), there is not a single biotech start-up moving in. Why not? Because no one will fund a biotech company that doesn't have a large patent portfolio. You can't get into the industry without a cross-licensing agreement with all of the major players, and you can't get that without a load of your own patents to offer. The result? A barrier to entry so high no one can get over it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Doctors & researchers were racing to find a cure for polio for the prominence of "discovering the cure." It has been postulated that the rush to find a cure for polio resulted in careless mixing of blood between test animals that brought the simian form of HIV to humans.
The same interest in curing HIV exists today, its just a harder problem to solve.
It's also easy to blame big evil drug companies for providing treatments rather than cures, but what about the big evil HMOs, who want to minimize costs? Certainly Kaiser Perminente and other HMOs are interested in cheap prevention measures, rather than expensive ongoing treatments.
Another issue preventing drug use is the lack of any mechanism similar to patent protection to induce finding new uses for existing drugs.
Consider Welbutrin: it was found to work better than other anti-depressants for many people, but after a media panic stunt that associated the drug with seizures, doctors were afraid to prescribe it. It was later found that the drug was also effective in helping people stop smoking. The Welbutrin name was tainted that its company rebadged it under a different name: Zyban. It was then proven that Welbutrin had no real danger for most people, and the seizure side effects associated with it only really affected people who already had seizure problems, and even then had less risk than alternative treatments.
Then Welbutrin (busparin) went generic and the profit motive for finding and proving new uses for the drug ended. Sales went to generics manufacturers.
Meanwhile, studies where already showing that welbutrin worked for many people as an aphrodisiac and could help them rebound from problems involving low libido, among other things. Unfortunately, not only was such a drug considered too racy (this was before Viagra), but since the drug maker would have to spend millions in clinical trials proving its efficacy, it made no sense to do so because there was little patent protection still available on the drug.
How many other drugs have known uses, but can't be formally proven because the costs are prohibitive? It's obvious that patent protection DOES create a strong profit motive for finding new uses for new drugs, but it does nothing for drugs we already have and know a lot about - drugs we know are fairly safe, and which have promising new uses.
A non-patent system, where new drugs are discovered and new uses are developed by non-profit 'open source' volunteers wouldn't have the money to do extensive formal clinical trials, which take years and can deliver huge disappointments. How far would Linux or any other FOSS project go in a software world where every program had to prove itself flawless over a long and expensive qualification testing period? Software is wholly unregulated, and anyone can dump out junk and sell it. Drugs aren't like that at all.
The only system that works at all is the huge profit potentials offered by patents, and it has serious shortcomings. As long as the FDA restricts new developments very conservatively, and as long as people can sue drug companies and win huge damages for any risk involved in taking a drug, we simply won't have full access to the drugs we already have.
Apple's Billion Dollar Patent Bluster