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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
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.