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Researchers Work Around Hepatitis Drug Patent
Several readers let us know about a pair of British researchers who found a workaround to patents covering drugs used to treat hepatitis C. The developers intend to produce a drug cheap enough to supply to people in the poorest parts of the world. The scientists found another way to bind a sugar to interferon, producing a drug they say should be as long-lasting and effective as those sold (at $14,000 for a year's supply) by patent holders Hoffman-La Roche and Schering Plough. Clinical trials could begin by 2008. The article quotes developer Sunil Shaunak of Imperial College London: "We in academic medicine can either choose to use our ideas to make large sums of money for small numbers of people, or to look outwards to the global community and make affordable medicines."
Before the arguments about the effectiveness of this drug compared to the patented one, the morality of patents on medicine and the soviet russia jokes break out; I'd like to show my respect for these people. It's great to see this effort!
Isn't it pathetic that researchers or bussinesses try to find workarounds for patents? This kind of news shows that patent ruling is totally flawed by design. I'm in favor of giving inventor a commercial advantage for his/her invention. This can be tax reduction for product using this patent etc. But giving inventor a monopolistic right is stupid however you evaluate the idea.
Unlikely. As the above example shows, you don't need extra profit to develop a new drug. Patenting a drug, thus making it unavailable to someone else is plain murder. A more sophisticated and 'civilised' way of murder, but still it is murder for money.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
For example Australian company Biota created and patented Relenza for treating bird flu, then Roche modified their product slightly to produce and patent Tamiflu.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
You missed the profits. Don't forget the silly profits. Almost £7 billion profit for Glaxosmithkline. You read that right - £7,000,000,000 - or $14,000,000,000.
They're suggesting making cheap drugs, keeping the patents away from big companies, and having clinical testing subsidised by the countries where they'd be used (which seems fair if they aren't trying to profiteer), as well as developing drugs on obscure illnesses which the west doesn't have (and big business ignores). It's a win/win situation. Stop making a noble effort sound like something bad.
Drug companies spend far more money on advertising than they do on research and development. The next time you watch "Wheel of Fortune", you might realize that the billions of dollars being spent pushing viagra and nexium on everyone are NOT making their way to fundamental advances in science.
2. The more money a drug company makes off a medicine, the more valuable it is. A drug company's profits are a function of how much people value that drug -- the drug's social utility (this is basic economics).
No matter what the local basement-dwelling Rand-ite may tell you, economics is not a science and is not necessarily the best model for health care. Human welfare is not a widget that can (or should) be bought and sold like a car or an mp3 player.
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
And how many millions of people will die in the meantime?
There are alternatives... like for example, allowing generics to be sold in 3rd world countries while preserving the patent in the USA & other developed nations. Or they could do zone pricing, where certain zones get cheaper drugs. The latter might even bring in a profit for the company, allowing them to sell to consumers (in developing countries) who previously could not afford the patent-inflated prices. Yes, I'm aware that there could be issues with this (smuggling the cheaper drugs back into developed countries), but I'd say that the benefits (millions of lives saved or improved) vastly outweighs the effort required to overcome these barriers.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
... just vehicles to ensure progress.
there is no such thing as a "natural right" an inventor has: patent law builds on the premise that a patent is a reward and that many people like to be rewarded.
you are confusing it with copyright law - which grants the author rights because it is his creation - no one else could habe written harry potter, for example. in contrast, sooner or later someone figures out how molecule XYZ can be synthesized - there usually is no "personal creativity" involved.
Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way things work in a capitalist society. Even with this drug, the researchers will have to convince some drug company to manufacture and distribute this drug. How will they do it? By convincing the manufacturer that they will be able to make a profit off of it. Here's the crux of the issue -- you state, As the above example shows, you don't need extra profit to develop a new drug. That's true. But in rare circumstances. The key is when you say "a" new drug. Not many new drugs. Why hasn't this method been used for lots of other patented drugs? Most likely b/c it's impracticable on a large scale.
You're unlikely to replicate the research large drug companies do in academia. Somebody has to pay for the research. The money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is usually from profits from drugs. And as I said earlier, profits are an indication of social utility -- how much people value the drug. The more profits, the more people value the drug. The larger the profit, the more good the drug does, and the more incentive to produce that drug (which is why capitalism is pretty cool). While you are denying people the drug now, it will be available to them in the future. With most patented medicines, the drug wouldn't have been developed in the first place if the drug companies didn't think they could have turned a profit. As I said, it's better to have the drug available in 14 years or so (or however long patents expire) than not have the drug available at all.
And admittedly, I haven't read the article. However, the summary mentions that the researchers are mimicking the actions of a patented drug. How do you think it was found out that this particular action helped in the first place? I'd be willing to bet my $.02 that it came from commercial drug companies hoping to make a profit.
Bottom line: Drug companies have to make a profit. They have to recover costs (and R&D costs are huge, as are clinical trials, and a lot of money gets spent researching drugs that will never make it to market). Patents ensure this and also incentivize drug companies to develop the most useful medicines.
Problem is that most money is not spend on research but on advertisement... about 2/3rd of the drug money goes into ads, and marketing.
It was "we in academic medicine", not "we in corporate medicine". Academic research is not motivated by profits, or at least, it should not be.
Secondly, you can't really apply demand-supply analysis on life-saving drugs. When it is a matter of life and death (and there isn't any alternative product), the demand is infinite.
Thirdly, it is quite possible to provide economic (and other) incentives to researchers, even without patents.
You know, there's a reason why doctors take the hippocratic oath. Medical researchers should do well to remember those reasons.
Ignore this sig
Keep in mind that what is deemed an unacceptable drug in the developed world can be a huge benefit to developing nations. For example, lets say I have a very cheap drug that cures malaria in 80% of patients, but causes severe side effects in the remaining 20%. Clearly, this is unacceptable in the USA or other developed nations. However, in many countries in Africa, where millions of people die from malaria every year, this drug is perfect - its cheap, and it cures most of the patients. Regardless of the reletively high side effects, the benefit is enough that a drug like this would be considered a godsend by nearly all sub-saharan nations.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
I never said the current system was perfect. I will agree that it (like everything else) is imperfect.
OTOH, be aware that, for example, companies tried to develop cheap generics of patented AIDS drugs for use in Africa. And they didn't go through thorough testing. And it turned out that the drugs weren't as good as the brand-name ones (in this case, it involved taking cocktails of drugs and putting them into one pill -- something even the patent holders hadn't been able to do successfully). In this case, the drugs weren't as effective, which then led to drug-resistant HIV viruses surviving.
Good intentions, yes. But we know where they lead....
That is a gross oversimplyfication.
I know and understand that companies often act unethical and there is a need to protect people from unethical behaviour. But if the development of medicine could take place in developing countries, the prices could be much lower even if we keep the companies to the same moral standards we like to do in western society.
Many people protest against poor developing countries having to pay high prices for medicine. At the same time arguments like yours keep it that way. It's not a simple problem.
the pun is mightier than the sword
"(the more profit, the more useful it is)" So a treatment for cancer taken three times daily for the rest of your life is more useful than a cure for cancer? I'll keep that in mind.
And this relationship explains the focus on treatments rather than cures, on insomnia rather than malaria, and on legal games* and marketing rather than research. I'll give you a fun fact, namely that only 15-20% of the average pharmaceutical's budget goes to research, far more goes to advertising (classy huh?).
There is value in some sort of protection for medical IP, but this story is a perfect example of where your argument doesn't apply, and isn't accurate. No profits, yet somehow the drug was developed anyway and will now have far greater utility. Profit as motive doesn't always work, particularly when the richest people tend to have the pettiest health concerns. Why make something for Javier dirt farmer (when he only has a few bucks to give you) when you can make something for joe gated community and he has insurance? And the answer is of course you wouldn't and so you make yet another well marketed ED med, instead of something for Typhoid.
* read (for example) about getting another few years by filing claims pretending to be consumers concerned about the effectiveness of generic replacements or getting another 20 simply by gel coating the drug
Relax I just want some peanuts.
'Cause, if they do, I'd like to donate $10 to their research fund.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Wow! I'm gobsmacked at your sheer, unabashed ignorance of "The way things work".
To the first: what do you think the ratio of new drug research is to profits? For a major drug company? Conversely, what do you think the ratio of marketing vs profits? Got a clue? No? Feel free to go do a little googling. It is an open secret that drug companies spend almost nothing (compared) on research into new drugs. Even then the research directed is in very, very specific (eg profitable) areas. Hint! It makes a lot more money to market a drug for "Erectile Disfunction" than to actually make a simple, cheap cure for just about any disease you care to name.
To address your second point: The profits made from a drug are a reflection of the profitability of that drug. Nothing more or less. Concrete examples of how _value_ and _profit_ are distinct concepts to follow.
To the third: Once patents run out, drug companies market new, patented drugs. Older, generic drugs are not marketed. Part of the reason this happens is that drug companies advertise directly to doctors (who write the perceptions) and part of the reason is that drug stores make more money selling drugs that cost more. There are a bunch of simple ways to fix most of this in legislation. That, however, is another can of worms.
Examples of point two and the relationship with point three:
Ritalin: Heard of it? Great! How about Dexamphetamine? Not so much? Little known fact! Dexampetamine is a more effective treatment for ADD and ADHD than Ritalin. However it is perscribed less than a fifth as much. Why? Because the patents on Dexamphetamine ran out years ago. It can be made by any drug company and is a commodity item. Profits are very, very low. Ritalin is very profitable because it is a treatment. A patient will need to continue to take Rtalin for years. Possibly forever. Profitability: High! Value: Fuck All! Ritalin does a worse job than a drug that costs less than a third of the price.
Treatment of stomach ulcers: A method of curing stomach ulcers has been around for more than ten years. Thats right, A complete cure! The Australian who discovered the cure was under attack from many major drug companies, who attempted to discredit him and his research. Why? Because anti-acid treatments of stomach ucers are a) Patented and b) something that needs to be taken _forever_. The cure relys on a simple, generic anti-biotic and some mineral treatments. Not patentable, therefore no profits.
If you give a shit about any of these issues, you might be interested in the process of testing and approval that goes on in the USA compared to other countries (Like the UK or Canada) and what the differences mean. You might also be interested in the "Evergreening" of medical patents and the blatant kickbacks that medical companies give Doctors and Pharmacists.
And YES, I am a fucking Pharmacist.
In the maelstrom of the chaos at the center of my mind, I taste the salt of sadness as I feel my soul unwind.
Sorry for the flamebait, but you're a moron. Here's why:
/.?
1. The software development industry is very different from the drug industry. In particular, look at the costs of bringing something to market. It costs far more to bring a patented drug to market than it does a computer program. So you have higher costs you have to recover.
2. Where does a lot of support for Linux come from? Companies like Red Hat and IBM, who are also competing and want to turn a profit. However, IBM and Red Hat can support different niches of the market without competing directly. This is harder to do with prescription drugs.
3. In effect, cooperation and competition are competing models. Cooperation appears to be working well in software (I'm currently using Firefox on Gentoo), but that model has failed to gain serious traction in the drug industry. If cooperation like this is so great, why hasn't it flourished more? Why aren't we seeing more stories of people cooperating like this working on new drugs?
Sigh, why do I try to promote standard, mainstream economics on
A thousand bucks says this is never going to pass FDA testing in the United States... and we'll never find out why.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
False. Research can be done under the auspices of a non-profit organization or university, as was done in this case.
2. The more money a drug company makes off a medicine, the more valuable it is. A drug company's profits are a function of how much people value that drug -- the drug's social utility (this is basic economics).
Clearly false. An effective, cheap vaccine against HIV, say, would be far more valuable than all the Viagra in the world.
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
Yes, after denying the public access for 20 years. Ever heard of the Hippocratic Oath? See: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=214714&cid=17
Funnily enough, you misinterpreted Professor Shaunak's quote. Here's some context from the BBC article:
After all, I am strangely colored.
So, here is proof that money and time was spent researching a useful medication for the good of sick people, regardless of cost of entry and return on investment (financially speaking, at least). So people really can create new ideas without the need to hoard them and profit greatly while excluding others.
Actually, copyright is specifically NOT a natural right in the US, although it is considered one in Europe. That was a major hangup in copyright treaties, until they agreed to disagree.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
1. Drug companies have to turn a profit; otherwise, they don't produce the drugs.
Do they really? Perhaps drug research should be limited by law to universities and not-for-profit organisations. The people who do the actual research are not the ones that rake in the hundreds of billions each year - that's the stockholders, who by God have enough already.
2. The more money a drug company makes off a medicine, the more valuable it is. A drug company's profits are a function of how much people value that drug -- the drug's social utility (this is basic economics).
Which is why they tend to do far more research in luxury problems (such as rejuvenation and weight loss for rich Americans) rather than trying to solve the big devastating diseases of the poor, such as malaria and other major killers. If they were not in it only for the money, they could solve those problems in just a few years - it is only a question of effort. But as I once heard a doctor friend of mine say: The medicine companies don't like medicine that cures people - once you cure a disease, you don't more money from that patient.
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
Well, then the patents should run out far more quickly than they do now. The patent system was created in a time where communication and research happened a lot more slowly, and it made sense that you could hold a monopoly for a longish interval; but nowadays 20 years of monopoly is totally out of proportion. I'd say the expiry period should be about 2 years; or 5 max.
What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalents?
This is a question designed to deceive, my friend. You know perfectly well that these are not the only two alternatives. I have outlined a couple of others above: make the patents period shorter, require that drugs companies are not for profit etc. There are many other ways; drugs research could be entirely state owned and free of any patents. As it is now, the drug companies look dispropotionately at the problems of the richest people in the world: age related problems (like cancer that mostly affects the elderly) and cosmetic problems. For example, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_diseases for a list of very serious diseases that receive far too little attention despite the fact that they kill people by the million; but of course they are just poor people, so they don't really count - not to an American, that is. Or am I wrong?
Hoffman-La Roche and Schering Plough released a statement today. It reads as follows:
"FUCK!"
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
I don't think that British guy understands that his country doesn't rule the world (not that "the colonies" know either) It may take rigorous government approval tests to use a drug in his country but in poorer nations the choice is use this drug or die...i doubt they really care about minor side effects. "You cured my life threatening disease but my HAIR HAS FALLEN OUT! Lawsuit incoming!"
Looking at the Slashdot frontpage right now, among the stories I see are: "Researchers Work Around Hepatitis Drug Patent", "Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs", "Month of Apple Fixes", "MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced", "Creating Prion-Free Cows". Maybe it's just my morning coffee making me optimistic, but it seems to me there's not usually this much positive news on Slashdot! Almost gives you hope for 2007, that does.
Basilisk Digital
These researchers don't work for a drug company they work at a university. What they're saying is that most research is now commercialised and findings like this would normally be licensed to a big company. This is at odds with the traditional view of public research which was for the benefit of everybody. Pretty rare to find any serious research going on nowadays that isn't either sold to or spun off into a commercial enterprise. Licensing the technology to all takers for a modest amount means they don't have to find anybody to make and market these drugs because the need will inevitably lead to somebody picking it up be it a government or charitable organisation.
Even with this drug, the researchers will have to convince some drug company to manufacture and distribute this drug. How will they do it? By convincing the manufacturer that they will be able to make a profit off of it.
Since this drug is in high demand with the governments of several nations it shouldn't be hard to find someone to make these even if it wasn't profitable. If in doubt you'd just rely on the cheap meds industry that usually makes medicine whose patents have expired. Considering the high prices of most drugs that are still under patents (and that this drug is a competitor to a very expensive drug) selling them at a lower price than the patented drug would make it easy to take most if not all of the market from the competition. Since these are aimed at developing nations and those can't really afford a 16k$/a treatment it not only steals the original drug's market but also covers markets the original drug did not.
Hey, there are governments willing to declare martial law just to circumvent drug patents. There's a LOT of demand for drugs that treat third world diseases while being sold at third world prices.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I work in the financial side of the health care industry (auditing hospitals, basically). I'd like to comment on your peptic ulcer example.
It is well understood that most (around 75%) of peptic ulcers are caused by an H. pylori infection. Unfortunately, the other 25% are caused by potentially serious conditions. My boss, an M.D./Ph.D. told me and my colleagues that he wouldn't hesitate to prescribe a round of antibiotics to his family members and trusted associates for an ulcer in lieu of invasive tests. But a doctor's liability is too high for that to become common in a hospital setting, leading to expensive invasive procedures.
Sorry for the tangent -- your comments reminded me of what my boss said. I don't intend to dispute your point regarding ulcer treatments. It is a practice our company intends to stamp out.
It doesn't matter how much they spend on advertising. It's not an alternative to paying for research. There isn't some fixed pile of money in the industry being divided up between research and advertisment. The investment world will dump as much money on pharma companies as the investors are guessing can be spent and return a profit.
If advertising the hell out of a product during a drug's short patent life increases the total profit, that means more return for investors, which means the whole industry can support that many more billions of dollars a year in investment before the profits get diluted back to the same return rate everything else gets. Some of this money will be spent on research, research that wouldn't happen otherwise.
If they cut back on advertisements (which net a profit for the company or they wouldn't be doing them), they wouldn't have more money for research, they'd have less money period, as the investors would just go elsewhere.
You're unlikely to replicate the research large drug companies do in academia.
The good folk at The Wellcome Trust might disagree with you there.
And unlike purely commercial entities, and while they do commercialise some of their efforts, they aren't trying to extract as much profit as possible like Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca are.
Bottom line: Drug companies have to make a profit. They have to recover costs
Drug companies DO have to make a profit, but to say that this is to recoup their R&D costs is a little naive. These companies must return a substantial profit for their shareholders. R&D is simply a means to an end, and that end is shareholder value.
Non-profit entities (as nicely detailed in TFA) are quite able to make great advances in medical science without the requirement for profit.
Pharmaceutical companies could then strive to manufacture these "open" drugs in as an efficient way as possible, in an effort to compete with other manufacturers. This competitiveness would give us, the public cheap, quality drugs, and allow the manufacturing companies to make a profit.
This is capitalism as it should be. This is medicine as it should be.
I've undergone pegaylated interferon treatment twice now... didn't work for me, however did for my brother, and you have to have AWESOME insurance to cover this stuff. I doubt the side effects (which are 11 months of hell) are any different, but if it was cheaper, and for the people who relapse when the drug does keep the virus in check, but comes back, this would be great. After the treatment I felt so good for the couple of months that the viral levels were low... I've been hoping for a prophylactic kind of treatment for a long time... I really hope the pharmco's aren't assholes about something like this.
Some years back my landlord told me that his dad (who was near 100 years old and living in a nursing home) was on a special medicine that was kept under lock and key and that the he kept the key.
The pills were locked up at the nursing home but he took the only key to the cabinet home with him.
He had to drive up there each day, unlock the cabinet and administer a single pill to his dad under the supervision of the head nurse. Each pill was $1,000 and his dad had to take one every single day of his life or he would die. I don't remember the name of the medication or what it was for but damn, $1,000 per day to stay alive?!! That's insane! Of course it was being covered by insurance as mere mortals couldn't have afforded that much money, the old man had been a big shot at a refinery in his day and had retired with super great benefits and insurance.
I would bet money on it that the pills were really only worth about $10 each at best but the vampire profiteers were sucking the life blood out of every living thing within 2 miles of that nursing home and the old mans insurance company.
I can't imagine in my wildest dreams what you could ever put into one little capsule that would be worth $1,000. Even gold dust isn't worth that much money. Perhaps some diamonds??
One thing that PISSES me off is profiteering drug company vampires.
The greedy things they do should be outlawed.
Bingo. You got it in one. The same goes for a lot of other fields as well. Take for example Diabetes-B, which is a controllable disease, as long as you check your bloodsugarlevel 2 times a day, and either use insulin or dieting restriction to adjust for it.
However, to do these tests, you need testsstrips, which are not very cheap, and (surprise!) don't get covered by almost all medical insurances. What *does* get covered is the amputation required when your extremities start dying off. Something that could've been very easilly prevented by aforementioned checks.
The hospitals and the insurance companies make more 'profit' off of those amputations than off of patients that need a steady supply of not-so-cheap teststrips.
So yeah, you got it in once. Treating the symptoms is (for the corporate world) almost always better than curing the disease.
Splut.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Clearly false. An effective, cheap vaccine against HIV, say, would be far more valuable than all the Viagra in the world.
More valuable by whose standard? How did most of these people get HIV in the first place? Because at some point they valued having sex higher than the perceived risk of getting HIV. Apparently, people value having sex a lot. That's not surprising, evolution would suggest procreation is as important as self preservation. Therefore a drug that helps people having better/more sex may very well be valued more than a vaccine that lowers the perceived risk of getting HIV depending on who you ask.
Obviously a vaccine against HIV would help everyone having more/better sex too, so I guess it's not such a very good example. My point is that it's very difficult to make these value decisions for other people. For me the value of lighting a cigarette is very negative. I never smoked. Other people value it so much that they're willing to risk their lives for it.
The money flow is just an indication of the underlying value system.
We're not that rational, really...
X.
business model does not involve producing medicines to cure illness and disease. It is engaged in the research and development of drugs which will be used to treat acute conditions over a long period that produce vast profits. This is why there has been no development by any Pharmaceutical company of a new anti-bacterial agent. The American Military almost single-handedly worked on strategies to tackle the problem of malaria and the development of the antibiotic pencillin, was conceived as having a strategic advantage during WWII when the very first batch of it was used to treat soldiers with STD's and almost instantly restored them to full battle readiness. The Pharmaceutical industry has a long history of encouraging people to believe that they research cures - the truth is that they do not. A very large part of the industry produces belief-based products such as homeopathy. The barriers constructed through the patenting of medicines creates an artificial market where the cost/benefits and profits are found in the sole ownership of something really essential - such as sildenafil citrate. Compare this to the amount of effort that went into not mentioning the fact that in 1979 two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall re-discovered(!) the cause and treatment of stomach ulcers was a) the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and b) low cost generic anti-biotics.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
While the average drug cost's between .8 and 2 billion dollars to develop. The cost are pretty simular I would say.
Most of the money in actual development is caused by the amount of care taken in developing the drug, There is a definite wish not to kill people. Now if we could only reduce the cost of advertising.
You obviously missed the entire "There are other ways to incite drug/tech/whatever development, than the current patent system" discussion going on around here for the last, oh kazzilion years. You don't have to RTFA, but at least read some of the previous comments.
Saying that the *ONLY* way a company can be motivated to create a new needed drug is to give it absolute, monopolistic power over a life saving/enhancing product, is kind of, well, dumb.
You have perfectly summed up why drug companies spend most of their time (and budgets) on fleecing rich people instead of curing poor people.
While you can make the argument that a specific drug X or Y would still be developed in the absence of profit motives, this is overlooking the fact that reduced profits mean a reduced incentive to produce drugs in the future.
Reduced profits is not "no profits" and the incentive of having to compete would in fact be a much greater push to produce new drugs once the artificial protection period of the patent was removed.
Your argument makes the incorrect assumption that drug companies want to cure disease. They do not; quite the reverse, in fact. They can't make money off healthy people.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I went to a symposium at UCLA in November, put on by Athgo International (athgo.org). A large part of the conference was focused on IPR and it's relationship to global health problems. While Hep C might be a good thing to fight, it doesn't compare to the ATMs (aids, tuberculosis, malaria) and perhaps the worst is malaria. Because those suffereing from it (in the third world) don't have any money, big pharma doesn't even develop drugs to fight new strains. A million people a year die from malaria (largely in the southern hemisphere), and it is a completely treatable disease.
Then again, there are too many people on this planet. Hmm, maybe thats how the pharmacuetical big-wigs justify it...
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Also Ritalin has nice side effects that make me think I'd rather have AD(H)D than take that crap.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines"
No. A monopoly give drug companies a large incentive for marketing. And fails to give drug companies appropriate market incentive for efficiency. 80% of pharma revenue is spent on marketing, administration and inefficient production. The R&D is just a necessary evil to obtail the particular monopoly necessary; witness the classic twist-a-molecule game to gain another 20 years monopoly with minimum investment and minimum improvement over current drugs (coincidentally, the particular game that is turned against the pharmaceuticals in this case).
"Look at it this way: What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalent?"
How about this alternative: having _five times_ the current amount of medical R&D and no pharma marketing at no increase in cost, or the same R&D but at a fifth of the cost and no pharma marketing?
Monopolies are a crap way to create any way or form of efficiency. The IP sector is no different from any other sector; protect companies from competition and you get bloated inefficient organizations capable of wasting unlimited amounts of funding and revenue.
Of course you'll see those bloated corporations claiming the monopoly is necessary; for their current level of inefficiency it _is_ necessary. However, that inefficiency itself isnt necessary, and a free market situation would force them to correct it, while leaving us free to more appropriately steer money into R&D.
Great argument here - just mention that probably some people will die due to patents and describe the situation with drug patents. Nice one.
You're autistic, right?
No, but apparently the incidency among AC's is rather high...
According to the money flow metric you espouse, you are more valuable than about 200 africans. That's wrong. Very very wrong.
That depends on the Africans in question. Some of them are actually richer than me. In any case wrong has nothing to do with it. It's the only way things appear to work. Systems based on fairness have been tried many times but they always turned out even worse than good old capitalism. However great your ideals, you are responsible for the effects if things turn out badly.
Perhaps, once you get out of puberty, you will reach the same conclusion. It requires an open mind and a healthy interest in the facts. I think it's a wonderful idea for people to try to create free or low cost medicines, but let's not try to break a system that has given us unparalleled health and technology, shall we?
Comparing a drug that gives an old fart a boner to a drug that can stop the spread of a deadly disease is wrong. Very wrong.
It wasn't my idea to compare the two.
Grow some compassion.
In sensible people compassion is governed by ratio.
The university people in the article could have chosen a better path by starting a company and using their ideologically limited profits to develope more medicines. Bill Gates may or may not be a rat, I'm pretty much convinced that he has done more to fight malaria than you and me put together.
X.
Could you clarify that about treatment for stomach ulcers? I thought that omeprazole was already off patent (we have 11 brands available here in the Czech Republic). The cost of treatment for omeprazole is about $0.33 to $1 a day here. It is usually given for 6 weeks, so the total cost is something up to $40. And it actually compeletely cures the ulcers! Wow! Amazing.
:)
I suggest you go back freshen up a little before you come preaching here.
And YES, I am a fucking doctor and no I don't have any shares of pharma companies.
See? Patents do encourage innovation!...by forcing others to work around existing patents. :-P
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Here are the Financial Highlights from the annual reports of Novartis, Pfizer and 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 and profits.
So the standard argument for granting patent monopolies and allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for the patented drugs - that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs - is simply not true.
The organization Doctors Without Borders gives an example of how pharmaceutical patents affect prices i a recent press release:
In this particular case, the price with patents was a hundred times the price without patents. How can 15% spent on R&D justify a markup by 10,000% on the final product?To the western world, pharmaceutical patents mean an enormous waste of money. In the third world, it's lives that are wasted instead. It's time to think about an alternative.
And alternatives exist - plenty of them, in fact. Nobel prize winner Joseph E Stiglitz has made one proposal. The Swedish Pirate Party has made another (or essentially the same, actually). Economist Dean Baker has collected four others, that also run along the same lines.
It's time to open up a global discussion about the effects of pharmaceutical patents, and the alternatives. Today's system is not only grossly immoral, it is also expensive and wasteful. It's time for a better way. Pharmaceutical patents kill.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
If it wasn't for patents, what would drive people to look for alternate treatments ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y."
Unlike physical property, the Constitution does not recognize the existence of intellectual property or any other intrinsic rights to ideas or inventions.
Therefore, patents create that right, they don't recognize it. And they create that right only temporarily, only for a very limited set of ideas, and only if the inventor actually lives up to specific requirements.
In contrast to physical property, the only generally recognized ethical obligation people have with respect to ideas is that they have to attribute them correctly.
People should keep in mind that a large part of the development of drugs is already financed by tax dollars. Yes: your tax dollars go towards drugs that drug companies then get a monopoly on in order to sell. It wasn't always so; I believe the law on that changed in 1980.
As I recall, Krugman did the calculation and computed how much tax dollars subsidize the development of patented drugs and how much tax payers end up paying for purchasing the resulting proprietary drugs, and he came to the conclusion that we'd be far better off if we simply abolished drug patents altogether and just paid for the entire drug development out of public funds.
An additional problem with the current patent-incentivized drug development system is that it meets aggregate market needs, not actual health needs. Concretely, it is more profitable for drug companies to develop endless variations on cold medicines that don't contribute significantly to health, and to develop drugs for treating the symptoms of diseases without healing the underlying diseases, than it is to develop drugs that quickly and effectively treat serious disease.
I love free markets, but for health care, they simply aren't working in their current form. If we want a free market-based health care system, we need to structure the health care market very differently, and that also includes massive changes to, or abolition of, drug patents.
It is funny you mentioned GlaxoSmithKline since the Rector of Imperial ( Sir Richard Sykes ) is the guy who facilitated the merger between Glaxo and Smith Kline. I would be very curious to find out what is his attitude against this research which apparently is not good news ( PR wise, I suppose ) for GlaxoSmithKline ( among others ).
You're really a fucking pharmacist? You don't seem to actually have much concept of the way things work.
Stomach ulcers have a cure. In some people. Those with helicobacter. And it's not just an antibiotic - it's three drugs (amoxicillin, metronidazole, and a PPI of your choice - let's say omeprazole. You mention a mineral (presume you mean bismuth?). There are a few different treatment regimens available, some with differences. I believe you can even get them as one pill with all the drugs in. Usually a week's course.
However, that doesn't address:
1. people who don't respond to this first treatment, or the second line treatment, or anything.
2. people who have non-infectious ulcers
3. people who have 'acid indigestion' - a myriad of diagnoses from oesophagitis, reflux, candida, and gastritis to functional dyspepsia (also called 'we don't have a diagnosis, but we've ruled all the treatable ones out, so w'll just treat your symptoms').
And the drug companies love it because they can market 'new' drugs from old, cheap generics (i.e. package them as one treatment, put it in a fancy box - they're not going to make much money off those same drugs otherwise).
Now, dexamphetamine is still a very popular drug for ADHD. I won't even go into how marketing directly to the parents causes overprescription as they demand that as it had the best glossy ad in their lifestyle magazine. Or how the condition is totally overdiagnosed by a society that is forgetting how to look after its kids (try it a hundred years ago, with no TV to babysit them while they eat their preservative laden dinner, before 4 hours of playstation then bed at 2am).
(PS to the indignant parents of ADHD kids - your little precious may or may not be 'real' ADHD. That's not my point. The sad fact is it's becoming a diagnosis of convenience for shit parents).
Anyway - I digress. There are a number of other holes in your statements (some of which have already been addressed by another physician) but in future, try to at least have a bit of knowledge about what you are talking about. I certainly don't believe you are a pharmacist, unless you trained a long time ago and never kept current.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
You are counting people as equals. You equate amount of money invested with people that benefit. That is just not true, specially in a capitalistic society.
If your reasoning had any logic, then casinos would be more valuable for society than hospitals, because there's more money invested into them.
The most money, globally, is overrepresented for rich people problems, like cancer and alzheimer. Globally, the most short term benefit for people as a whole would be acheived if that money was invested (as an example) into _cheap_ vaccines for AIDS, and other infectious diseases.
The bias is set by concentration of wealth, and while it is the way things work and we should deal with it, it is a flaw in the system.
Of course, the same thing happens in a less obvious fashion, inside developed and underdeveloped countries.
Pharma companies get patents granted , and then the governments that granted them, are not able to pay for proper treatment for their citizens.
If governments in general spent their money into funding research instead of paying for already invented medicine, there is no reason to believe, a priori, that the outcome would be worse than the current (bad) situation.
Of course, it is more obvious in the third world. There is little natural incentive to honor foreing patents, and that is why trade agreements that protect "IP" are so important for the US and the EU.
The issue is very similar to the proprietary software vs free software thing. The same thing was argued, back in the day, that big software could not be developed without funding, and the promise of future profit from licenses. That was proven to be non true. I'm really hoping something like that (not the same, but a system that shares some fundamentals witht he FSF) happens in the pharma industry. I think it could happen.
It appears in many studies that R&D costs and clinical studies are the main drivers of cost:c le/2006/12/19/AR2006121901510.html
d f
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
A comprehensive look (and really interesting read) is here:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/dimasi2003.p
Where it goes into great detail about drug development costs.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
At the risk of being modded redundant to myself, people should look at this link before drawing conclusions about the development costs of drugs.
d f
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/dimasi2003.p
And I think that you're being modded a troll is complete incorrect. Moderators, just because you don't agree with someone doesn't make them a troll.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This is why Bill Gates' largesse with respect to fighting disease should be taken with a grain of salt. Because the research he supports is protected by the IP regime, the actual cost of delivered drugs may be significantly higher than they otherwise might. It's very analogous to the way Microsoft values their software contributions to schools and other charitable causes. Instead of considering the actual cost of manufacturing and distribution, they include a giant markup to cover their "intellectual property". Software is worse, because you don't even get title to actual software, but only a license.
... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Much of Bill's money is going toward research. That's great. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the cost of supporting the IP regime. There would be far more medicine available to assist the disadvantaged if there were actual competition in the marketplace.
I don't consider Bill a hopeless case. He understands full well the burden IP protections place on the marketplace. Bill could transform himself from an unequivocal business titan to a truly transformative historical figure if he would use his clout to press for real change in patent and copyright law. By doing so, he could do far more to make the world a better place than by simply contribributing a few meager billions of dollars. Money is just money. Ideas last forever.
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
--Bill Gates
I'm glad to see you decided to respect my patent on the tag. If you are interested in using this tag in the future, contact me for licensing rights.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
And YES, I am just a normal guy with no medical training whatsoever.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You're a pharmacist and think dextroamphetamine is always better then methylphenidate? I highly suggest you pull out the prescribing information on those two products and look at side effect profiles, abuse potentials, risk of dependence, etc. Most people don't need the increased strength (and the problems that come with it) of dextroamphetamine, so methylphenidate is a better alternative. You know what works even better than dextroamphetamine? Desoxyn (methamphetamine). But that is only prescribed when nothing else works, and for a reason similar to why dextroamphetamine is only prescribed when methylphenidate doesn't work; while it's "better" since it's much stronger, it has significantly more common and severe side effects along with a much higher abuse potential/risk of dependency.
Turns out this is the case in alot of these situations. Let's look at COX-2 inhibitors. They aren't any more effective at relieving pain than aspirin et al. (which bind COX-1 also), but alot of people can't tolerate the side effects of the OTC stuff. The side effects come from COX-1 activity, but the desired effect comes from COX-2 activity. So new drugs targeted exclusively to COX-2 with no COX-1 activity had all of the pain killing effects and none of the side effects.
That's what alot of new drugs are about, reducing side effects so more people are able to tolerate the drugs.
And YES, I am a fucking psychobiologist specializing in psychopharmacology.
Omeprazole (aka Prilosec) alone won't cure ulcers, but in combination with antibiotics it can. In the US, except for OTC antibiotic ointments, antibiotics in anything require a prescription.
To quote wikipedia:
"Use in Helicobacter pylori eradication
Omeprazole is combined with the antibiotics clarithromycin and amoxicillin (or metronidazole in penicillin-hypersensitive patients) in the one week eradication triple therapy for Helicobacter pylori. Infection by H. pylori is the causative factor in the majority of peptic and duodenal ulcers."
Also see "Management of Helicobacter pylori Infection" ( http://www.aafp.org/afp/20020401/1327.html )
And no, I'm not a medical doctor, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I certainly could have written Ulysses. It's only a story about some bloke pissing around Dublin.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Actually, omeprazole alone WILL cure ulcers. Most ulcers would even heal on their own.
The reason antibiotics are often given is the association between Helicobacter infection and ulcers. Eradication of this bacteria improves healing but most importantly it reduces your risk of getting ulcers again it the future. But (depending on your population, of course) the prevalence of H. pylori is actually decreasing and more and more ulcers seen today are H. pylori negative (in the two years I worked at a GE clinic, I would say that only a minority of ulcers were H.p. positive). Aspirin and other NSAIDs are very good ulcer-causing drugs that are nowadays consumed in enourmous quantities by ever increasing population of patients. No need to give antibiotics to there ulcers.
So to repeat myself - omeprazole alone can help ulcers heal, if there is H. pylori, antibiotics are given as well.
The argument should, I think, be more around Pharma having incentives to allow licenced cheap production of patentable drugs locally...
Are you on medication?
...they'd sell less. Make less profit. They don't spend money on advertising just for fun...Big pharma lives and dies by it's megabrands and these appear to need to be advertised in the US. I'm much more comfortable with *no* advertising of prescription medication, but I guess that's an issue to address the US TV networks with, rather than the companies that avail themselves of their advertising...
You managed to slip in an ad hominem attack on anyone who dares disagree with you, before they can even respond. Nice way to encourage rational dialog. Or maybe you're so self centered you believe anyone who ever disagrees with you is defective.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Possibly none of the same side effects, but a heart attack may make you think twice!
And no - I'm not at all medical, but I am a fucking pedant.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Scherling Corp appears to hold the key patent impacted by this one. Work arounds aren't about destroying the value of the patent system, many companies employ work-around techniques to mitigate the value of a potential license and drug companies, or any company, need to account for their pricing with the potential ramifications of activities like this.
www.patentmonkey.com
or hers
Sorry . . . but you did put it in bold.
only one everything
The new "workaround" to bind Interferon with Sugar, is to use an aqeuous solution, with a neutral PH balance, and apply torroidal disturbances to the solution matrix. They have essentiall patented stirring -- and the charity part is just a sneaky way to get everyone on their side, until they start charging licensing fees for your morning cup of coffee!
I'm going to plunk my last $750 in the bank down right now, on patenting a method for using a temperature elevated aqeuous solution, to bind disparate subtances in a solution with torroidal disturbances. If nothing else, I'm going to make sure my morning cup of coffee is firmly Copy-Left.
Then, from the procedes, I'll add the "temperature elevation" through microwave excitation of molecules -- sure the Microwave has already been patented -- but nobody thought to "bundle up" the full procedure. We are talking about a full "PROCESS" here people! I'll just have to deliver 10,000 pages of prior art -- no biggy.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Could you clarify that about treatment for stomach ulcers? I thought that omeprazole was already off patent (we have 11 brands available here in the Czech Republic).
Ah, maybe that's the difference then. Yes it's off patent, and no it isn't advertised here in the states, and by the way much of the advertising is done directly to doctors. So between the advertising targeting patients and free samples and such given to doctors, nobody is asking for it. My father has an ulcer, and between ten different doctors only one brought up the antibiotic, but wouldn't prescribe it for what seemed to me spurious reasons -- since the helicobacter can be spread via saliva, his wife would have had to take it too, and it kills much of your digestive tract bacteria so basically you have the never-ending shits for a few days. Um, okay, a few days of the runs so that your spouse can be free of ulcer pain for the rest of their life? Sounds okay to me. Granted this is all from memory years ago, I'm not sure omeprazole is the same drug.
The cost of treatment for omeprazole is about $0.33 to $1 a day here. It is usually given for 6 weeks, so the total cost is something up to $40. And it actually compeletely cures the ulcers! Wow! Amazing.
Right, and yet few people even know it exists over here, antacids still reign as treatment. Which was exactly the GP's point.
The enemies of Democracy are
Creative thinking, observing things from a unique perspective and hard work is what leads scientist to these discoveries. Saying that these discoveries are simply a matter of putting a few more bricks on an existing wall and that someone else eventually would have done this anyway is an insult to the discoveries of the scientific community.
Harry Potter built on a wealth of previously existing literature about wizards and magic, but that doesn't cheapen it in anyway...
Just because you don't see the artistic, creative beauty of science doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Things that are systematic and functional can also be artistic.
If you must!
There are various moral issues at work here. I am a retired pharmacist of 30 years and the son of a pharmacist.
The key issue arises out of the decision in the 1950's to allow pharmaceutical manufacturers to operate outside the ambit of professional bodies. Prior to the '50's the manufacture of pharmaceuticals was very small scale and handled at pharmacy level in the main. The advent of major chemical research enabled the analysis of chemicals and the development of chemical moeities at a much more sophisticated level.
I am not aware why the decision was taken in the '50's to allow people other than pharmacists to own and develop pharmaceuticals but it was probably economically driven. By going this route it put owners outside effective control of professional bodies. This in hindsight was wrong because in many respects a great deal of research at company level is driven by profit and not by the needs of communities as has been stated a lot in this thread, eg HIV, TB, malaria.
The period of patent protection at 20 years is fair enough since the patent is taken out before any product is actually developed. The company may in fact register many patents for slightly different molecular stuctures of the same active ingredient. Over the 10 years of testing and development perhaps only 1 will be found to be useful. It is a norm for products to take 10 - 12 years before they hit the market.
Generics are also not rationally priced. In most cases generic pricing is not relative to production cost but has a direct relationship to the original. In most cases the original manufacturer supplies the active ingredient to the generic manufacturer. The original manufacturer seldom if ever reduces their price once the patent expires.
The one thing is certian, until Governments take hard decisions about the morality of exploiting the sick and vulnerable, this is going to continue.
>$14000 a year? Who really can pony that up? I am living in the US and I make a very good living compared to a lot of other people in my area, especially in the world and if I wouldn't have any health insurance, I doubt I could really get that up for myself, let alone if I had a family.
$14k a year is for a lot of Americans over 1/4 of their yearly income before taxes. Imagine living in a poor country where your total income IS $14k or lower, those people can never get their hands on such products.
Roche and other big pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, Janssen) have made health and health insurance a trillion dollar industry and apparently have no regret that they are killing people, not only in third world countries but I can imagine that a lot of people in the US and Europe can't get the medicine they need because of them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
IANAPharmacologist, but even I know that COX-2 inhibitors are bad news. See sibling.
:(){
Drug companies are just that.. companies, businesses, profit makers! Are you trying to tell them to not make money but invest money in research, ads, etc and just give their products away?
What many people are stuggling with here is not what a drug company should or should not do but that they want social welfare where the government pays for the research of the drugs then it can freely be given away.
I am sry but there is no way to look at this problem and blame the drug companies. They are just doing what any other business does, make money.
If you want to discuss the probem, talk about the expense of using capitolism in drug research/production. Would we get as many ground breaking medicines if we relied on a non profit agency to produce them or does having competition produce more.
You, sir or madam, are no pharmacist. No pharmacist, or anyone with any sort of education, would blatantly say one drug is a better treatment for a disease/set of symptoms than another due to simple patient variability. That is besides the simple fact that methylphenidate (Ritalin) is already available as a generic. And as far as ulcer treatments go you cannot assume that ALL ulcers are created equally - by H. pylori bacteria. The most common form of treatment for ulcers where H. pylori is implicated is a proton pump inhibitor (there is a generic in this class) and an antibiotic (clarithromycin, tetracycline or even amoxicillin, plenty of generic choices). How would antibiotic therapy be effective for a patient that does not have H. pylori? Ever look in a pharmacy trade magazine? Plenty of generic medications are marketed. Again, you are no pharmacist.
We sell Prilosec (omeprazole) by the boxload OTC for under fifty cents a day.
Pfizer is hardly a representative sample of the average drug company at an average time in recent history. They are probably the most successful drug companies right now because they have a few highly successful blockbuster drugs still on patent. This picture is likely to change for the worse over the next several years as their patents expire and the current pipeline is apt relatively dry.
And this is a meaningless statistic in a heavily R&D driven business. All this means is that their COGS sold, i.e., the to actually manufacture the pills themselves, is about 35% on average. It says nothing of the cost of R&D, licensing, legal/lawsuits, management overhead, and, gasp, even sales (which are important to ANY business).
The 42 billion dollar you cite is "gross profit" which ignores various important operating expenses like: R&D, SG&A/overhead, one time charges, and other important expenses. After these expenses are taken into account the "profit" is roughly 11 billion dollars. Furthermore, it also ignores interest ($471M) and taxes ($3.5B). The actual net income available to shareholders was roughly 8 billion dollars (about 80% less than what you suggest) and this is the most relevant number if you wish to discuss the attractiveness of the businesses and its cost structure. Numbers for the lazy.
Now you might argue that 42B over COGS is only possible in large part because of patents, but then you'd also have to acknowledge that without that 42B dollars a lot of other essential activities like R&D, IT, Legal, mgmt, etc would not be covered. In other words, even if we assume that the shareholders need no profits, and strip them of their 8B dollars, the notion that there are huge savings to be had over the long term by eviscerating the drug companies is not borne out by the numbers.
Wrong. Toyota owns more than ten thousand patents.. What's more, each non-Toyota component in the car typically claims at least several patents, even if not owned by Toyota those patents still spur innovation.
By the way, Redhat (RHT) has profit margin of 18%.
Let's evaluate, shall we? Ask yourself, why would a company possibly eat into their profits to spend even $1 on advertising? Could it be because they expect >$1 return?
The money spent on advertising generates more money for research. Not less. You would be just as absurd complaining about how St. Jude's Hospital spends so much money advertising for donations. Their expenditures result in more money to help sick kids get better, and the situation is exactly comparable.
You may besides consider that in as much as we are discussing monopolistic patents, these companies are generally not advertising to compete against other products, but rather to perform the service of informing people about the existence of their product, i.e., people who would otherwise not receive treatment due to ignorance of its availabilty.
On top of that, the increased scale of marketing decreases the optimal sale price.
No matter what the local basement-dwelling Rand-ite may tell you, economics is not a science and is not necessarily the best model for health care. Human welfare is not a widget that can (or should) be bought and sold like a car or an mp3 player.
economics
-noun
1. (used with a singular verb) the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, or the material welfare of humankind.
No one's telling you to like the conclusions of economics, but saying it is not a science is astoundingly ignorant. What else do you call a mathematical theory of behavior that is firmly grounded in real-world confirmation?
Your assertions about the value of human welfare may be right; but quite honestly, they are not relevant to the discussion. I for one would tender that a human life is infinitely valuable. Would I therefore justify sacrificing the entire U.S. GDP to save one person? Would I do something like outlaw peanut butter in order to rescue those persons who may otherwise die from peanut allergies? How about outlawing cars?
The moral value of a person against other physical things is simply not a realistic metric for political decisions. You must instead base your analysis on the apparent worth of health, longevity, etc.. A free market provides the best system for this. A human life may be of infinite value, but this is not how people behave (or else--why the continued market for cigarettes?) and in governmance we must defer to the latter, not the former.
And how many millions of people will die in the meantime?
Quite a few, but also rather a lot less than if we decided that making ineffective moral gestures was more important.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It is also worth keeping in mind that patents and copyrights have important diferences. A strong copyrights has little chance of colliding with the rights of others to create independently whereas a strong patent necessarily demand significant breadth and these create a significant chance of interfering with independent invention (or at least creates the opportunity for someone to make a credible claim). I support strong patent rights, but I can accept a more nuanced view of these than I can copyrights.
0The small increase only affects patients who already have risk factors for heart trouble (hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, etc.) and take very high doses for very long periods of time. I don't know how many people you happen to know who take those medications, but most people taking them who aren't otherwise at risk for heart attacks are told to remain on them, and prefer doing so, since the alternative is being in pain (which is actually preferably to the OTC side effects).
Despite the media sensationalism, healthy adults don't suddenly have heart attacks from COX-2 inhibitors.
Furthermore, you seem to be under the false impression that any dollar spent on promotion is a dollar wasted or that any good drug will sell itself. However, the facts do not support your opinion. Many good drugs have been under-prescribed for a long time despite the drug companies' promotional efforts and guidance from leading experts, the CDC, etc.
For instance, it is widely known by cardiovascular experts today that statins have been way under-prescribed. There have been numerous studies that have shown that roughly 1/3 of heart attacks would be prevented if statins were prescribed to high-risk patients alone. This despite the fact that statins were introduced well over 18 years ago for precisely this purpose. The number of high risk patients on statins was just 9% in 1992 (several years after their introduction) and just 19% in 2002. Even after a year after additional studies were performed (e.g., "Adult Treatment Panel III") just 50% of said patients were on the statins. Read it. Virtually every industry advertises especially those with something new to sell and those with very high fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs.
Besides just the issue of under-prescription you should also consider that profit margins are not fixed. If they spent nothing on promotion it is very likely that their sales would suffer terribly. Assuming R&D and other non-promotional overhead is held constant their margins would quickly be reduced into negative territory, which would force them to raise prices or cut back on R&D to make it a viable business (or raise more capital, which would be impossible). The odds are very high that most classes of drugs would cease be economically viable since the few patients that are prescribed a particular new drug in some dire circumstance would not be able to afford the vastly higher prices.
These thoughts are fine and good, but this doesn't change the fact that drugs are produced largely by private US corporations (and a handful of Euro firms...which are increasingly coming to the US) and that they need to cover their primary costs (R&D) and they even, gasp, need to make a profit to ensure continued investment. Until such time that our government, hell ANY government, proves itself capable of developing its own medicines with any reliability, let alone doing them nearly as cost-effectively, I would not want government to meddle with the drug industry model (except, perhaps, in the most extreme of circumstances, like AIDS drugs in the 3rd World).
So, learn to make the drugs. It's not illegal to make a patented drug, only to sell it.
"(There is something to be said about business cycles actually strengthening the economy by threatening to cull the herd, but I don't see corporations being that altruistic...)"
Cull the herd?
I know, you were being metaphorical. You meant culling corporations. But one of the things we're discussing here is people needing life-saving or life-extending drugs who are unable to afford them. You can imagine what happens if they don't get the drugs.
I do like your economics. I just found your choice of phrase there somewhat chilling.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
I give these researchers 3 cheers, and hope their work will contribute to the greater good. If only the entire healthcare field was so centered.....
No words of wisedom here.
From Bandolier:
"A great deal of thinking will need to be done. There will be, and have been, suggestions that all these drugs, including over the counter analgesics, should be withdrawn. But in both these large studies half the patients were present or former users of NSAIDs or coxibs. Alternatives are few, with problems of their own."
Consider that the "alternatives" are acetaminophen (liver damage with high doses) and Flintstones chewable morphine...
I haven't seen that in Canada... were the twice a day Amoxi-Clav 875s not big enough? :-D
"part of the reason is that drug stores make more money selling drugs that cost more"
I'm not sure about the US, but this isn't true in Canada - we just make the dispensing fee. (Any markup isn't paid for by Pharmacare, so this just results is pissed-off customers. The exception is for IA, which pays a meagre markup on prescribed OTC meds - not covered at all by other drug plans - instead of a dispensing fee.)
A way that seems to work reasonably well in BC is the concept of LCA drugs - "Lowest Cost Alternative"...the government will pay for the cheapest drug in a class (eg, a generic, instead of an evergreened super-duper ultra-extended-release form).
"Ritalin is very profitable because it is a treatment." And dextroamphetamine is a cure?!
"Treatment of stomach ulcers"
The treatment(s) you are talking about is for H. Pylori, and pretty much all of the regimens - there are several - involve a PPI, like Losec. I think I might of read one somewhere involving H2 blockers, but I've never seen that in practice, and it probably wouldn't work very well. I've never heard of a regimen not using acid reduction therapy to heal the ulcer. (Plus, pure antibiotic therapy would do nothing to help heal ulcers due to NSAIDs, etc.)
"blatant kickbacks that medical companies give Doctors and Pharmacists"
Where are my kickbacks? ;_;
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You've managed to ruin any credibility you may have had by inserting an unecessary but trendy anti-American comment.
No I don't think so. I may have antagonised Americans, though I think most thoughtful Americans can see that this is an attempt at provoking denial - especially as it is followed by the question 'Or am I wrong?'
Apart from that - I think it is obvious to most that American culture and mindset, as it is projected to the rest of the world, has a clear tendency towards the heartless and utterly selfish. Again, I am well aware that many, possibly most, Americans are not in fact selfesh and heartless; but where the hell are all you good guys?
test
Thank you.
So, you think pharmaceuticals would work out much better if they came from the government, but not from the current American government. That's not good. We can vote out bad governments, but we clearly also vote them in. The administration that is pure enough, and free enough from corporate influence, to allow only government-controlled drugs to be made will have to include safeguards against the next government that is as corporate-friendly as the one we've had in place for the past four years. Even then, there is no way to stop that admin from allowing the corps. to work alongside the government in drug-making.
There are incentives other than the profit incentive that rush drugs. The reason so many drugs get approved too quickly today was, back in the early '90s, an AIDS drug was under the approval process, but because the process was longer then, somewhere between thousands and millions of people would die while it was being tested. Humanitarians everywhere protested the time lag, and so the fast-track process was born. If there were no corporations involved, the government wouldn't fast-track as many drugs as they do now, but they would still fast-track the ones seen as most desperately needed. If COX-2 inhibitors fall into that class (rheumatoid arthritis isn't deadly, but it is painful and debilitating), then the Vioxx problem could happen again--and I'm not yet convinced that there'd be any other COX-2 inhibitors ready to replace it under your system.
Yes, the gov. could research drugs that the corps. wouldn't, and that could be beneficial. But it can't research them and all the drugs that all the corps. do research: that would take billions of dollars, and the kind of gov. that would start this sort of program is not the kind of gov. that would just shove it all onto the national debt. The funds can't come from selling the drugs, which are all at cost of manufacture or less; therefore, they must come from taxes of some sort. You know how even a noble American feels about taxes when he is aware of paying them.
Competing drugs in the same class from corporations is, well, competition. From the government, copmpeting drugs in the same class might look like pork. The public can demand research, but it can also demand the end of research. This is part of your plan, of course; that's why you have transparency. But you ask that the public be educated enough to know which lines of research should be followed, or that it listen to the researchers when the decision whether to continue is made. We can guarantee neither in a democracy.
So this might not solve the benzodiazepate/SSRI problem. In our world, Valium and its kin had been around and apparently working fine for a good forty-five years before Prozac was discovered. In that time, there was nearly twenty-five years between when it was decided that Wellbutrin wasn't that good a replacement for Valium-type drugs and when the next non-Valium-type drug that was effective in that area was released--and buspirone isn't quite as effective; it's just safer. Prozac came approx. five years later...
Anyhow, if Valium and its kin work well enough for forty-five years, why invent Prozac? Why even have more than one drug in the Valium class out at a time--which would kill Haldol (to the relief of some), but might also keep Xanax off the market (for better or worse)? Drug research would be funded as much as Congress wants, but how can the public tell legit research from pork?
If you think that Valium & Prozac are lifestyle drugs that never needed to be invented, try to imagine this argument in some more critical field. Say, anti-seizure drugs.
Your idea is noble. I am just cynical and afraid of unintended consequences.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
The research costs for Twinkies were sunk decades ago; the basic formula hasn't changed since 1930 or so. Last I checked, brand-name Twinkies were $1.00 for two, or $3.50 or so for a dozen. They cost less than that when they came out, but money was worth more then. Of course, generic "Twinkies" do cost $0.50 for two...
The research costs for the sorts of cookies that sell for $3.50 a bag were sunk some time ago: 100 years for Oreos perhaps, approx. 75 for chocolate chip and chocolate chunk, centuries for most other classic varieties. More recently researched cookies sometimes cost $3.50 a cookie, or $3.50 for six cookies, or $7.00 a tub. Prices on older cookies held mostly steady through inflation. And cookies don't require that much skill to make: most people can follow a cookie recipe. Even more can make cookies from a box mix (also approx $3.50 for "a bag" of results, not counting oil & eggs).
The research costs for coffee were sunk 1000 years ago, and it didn't require that much research to discover it. I'll presume that it cost far more, relatively, back then than it does now. Recently researched coffees have been known to cost $3.50 for 12 oz. or $6.00 for 6 oz. or $14.00 for 2 oz. Even coffee at $2.99 a pound often uses 13-oz. pounds nowadays.
I'm not saying that the price of that heart drug is reasonable. I'm not saying that that corp. isn't gouging you and your grandma; $100.00 a day is likely typical for new medicine, regardless of how essential it is for the patient, but that doesn't make it easier to take or pay. But still, if discovering that drug required as much R&D as Twinkies did, and if the drug is as hard to process for market as coffee is, then it's logical that it costs more than Twinkies or coffee. That patent will expire someday; someday the price will go down.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Okay. We might not need as many drugs as we do now. But how can we be sure which actual drugs we'll want before we find them?
If synthetic drugs will be replaced with naturally occurring compounds, and since in your plan the government will be in charge of everything anyway, the natural compounds must be tested as thoroughly as the synthetic drugs. Some natural drugs are safe and work. Some don't work, however, and a few aren't safe. Your system should treat ephedra exactly like ephedrine: both are okay, or neither are.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Thanks for the post! I like your analysis: even those who disagree with your conclusions should find your analysis useful. /. prefer 14+14 with renewal, and given that software is copyrighted you have a point. If copyright is optional, either 14+14 or 28+28 can be made to work. I think 14 alone is too short for the genius works.
I believe that patents and copyrights should both exist, neither conflated nor annihilated.
I believe that patents and copyrights should fall under different standards. Patents should be handled under the utilitarian model: most inventions are more perspiration than inspiration. Either 17 or 20 years is decent. Since these patents cover drugs, we'd best make it 17. Software patents are banned--copyright is enough for software.
The sorts of work that copyrights cover include a lot of utilitarian work, but also a lot of genius work. Copyright law should cover both kinds, and it actually used to cover both kinds. So, I hereby propose that we return to the system used before the Sonny Bono Copyright Act: registration and notice of copyright required, 28+28 terms, explicit renewal required for the second 28. There would be less need for copylefts in this system, and works will get covered according to how the people who make them value them--but within limits. No work would be covered for more than one average lifetime.
I know most on
"Life" must never be part of a copyright term, because life is unpredictable. "Life+" guarantees that a work is covered too long; "life" alone encourages assasination of artists.
I do not want "copyright=14 years+revenue" for similar reasons: that too is indeterminate, and it'll lock out of the public domain the works that would most benefit the public domain. If "14+revenue" became law, the film industry would suddenly become profitable, and there will be 15th anniv. editions of every new film made...
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Well, at least there is more than one drug company. I imagine that the number of drugs we get now is greater than the number we would get from direct government development by the number of companies competing with each other for prescriptions. The sit. could be better--there have been quite a few mergers in Big Pharma, and there is too much advertising. Prescription drug ads no more belong on TV and radio than cigarette ads do. But it could be worse...
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney