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.""

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Cure for AIDS, cancer discovered in 1990?

[phantonym]

From http://educate-yourself.org/be/: In the Fall of 1990, two medical researchers, Drs.William Lyman and Steven Kaali, working at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City made an important discovery. They found that they could inactivate the HIV virus by applying a low voltage direct current electrical potential with an extremely small current flow to AIDS infected blood in a test tube. Initially, they discovered this in the lab by inserting two platinum electrodes into a glass tube filled with HIV-1 (type 1) infected blood. They applied a direct current to the electrodes and found that a current flow in the range of 50-100 microamperes (uA) produced the most effective results. Practically all of the HIV viral particles were adversely affected while normal blood cells remained unharmed. The viral particles were not directly destroyed by the electric current, but rather the outer protein coating of the virus was affected in such a way as to prevent the virus from producing reverse transcriptase, a necessary enzyme needed by the virus to invade human cells. Reverse transcriptase allows the virus to enter a human T cell line (called CEM-SS) and commandeer the DNA reproduction machinery. After using the host cell to reproduce itself into thousands of new virii, the swollen host cell (now called syncytia or giant cell) will burst and spew the contents into the bloodstream or lymph system. This is how the virus spreads, but lacking reverse transcriptase, the HIV virus can't invade the host cell and it becomes vulnerable to destruction by the body's immune system. (The details of this experiment can be read from Kaali's patent application.) I advice everyone to watch the following video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-338394831 5844437935