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AIDS Drug Patent Revoked In US
eldavojohn writes "Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art. This is potentially good news for India & Brazil who need this drug to be cheap; if the US action leads to the patent being rejected in these countries, competition could drastically lower prices. But the ruling bad news for Gilead Sciences. The company has vowed to appeal. We discussed this drug before."
Did you ever wonder why, if the government considers it important to society, they can use eminent domain and forcibly buy your house, tear it down and for example build a railroad there. Real property needs to yield when it is important for society as a whole.
Yet, if some company hold so called "intellectual property", say for a HIV-drug, and millions of people in your country are HIV positive and will DIE if not given the drug, then there is NO similar set of laws that allow the government to forcibly buy the rights to manufacture the drug ?
Notice that with eminent domain the government still has to PAY for the property. But you are forced to sell, even if you would prefer not to, is my point.
I think it would be very sensible to have a similar system for patents: let the government buy them out if they are sufficiently important for society. By all means, make the price such that the company comes out ahead, significantly more than it cost to develop the patent in questions.
It's very strange, I think, that "We want to build a road here" is reason enough to overrule real property while "25% of our population will die if they don't get this treatment" is not reason enough to overrule so-called "intellectual" property.
Yep, the only problem is what happens when the philanthropic contributions don't meet the need even half way (or one tenth of the way). Do you grab the money by force anyway (taxes) or do you say well let those who can't afford the treatment suffer and die, property rights are more important
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The $800 million figure is based on the small unrepresentative subsample of all new drugs. It excludes the majority of "new" drugs that are extensions or new administrations of existing drugs, as well as all drugs developed by NIH, universities, foundations, foreign teams, or others that have been licensed in or bought. Variations on existing drugs probably cost much less because so much of the work has already been done and trials are simpler.
About half of the $800 million figure consists of "opportunity costs", the money that would have been made if the R&D funds had been invested in equities, in effect a presumed profit built in and compounded every year and then called a "cost." Drug companies then expect to make a profit on this compounded profit, as well as on their actual costs. Minus the built-in profits, R&D costs would average about $108 million 93% of the time and $400 million 7% of the time.
The $800 million estimate also does not include taxpayers' subsidies via deductions and credits and untaxed profits (DiMasi, Hansen, and Grabowski 2003; DiMasi, Hansen, Grabowski et al. 1991). Net R&D costs are then still lower.
Contrary to some press reports from the industry, screening for new compounds is becoming faster and more efficient and the time from initial testing to approval has shortened substantially (Kaitin and Healy 2000). The large size of trials seems more due to signing up specialists to lock in substantial market share. Advertising firms are now running clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002; Peterson 2002; Moyers 2002).
I don't see any contradiction there. If the government needs a road which is important for the society to build, it forcibly BUYS the house from the owner and pays the fair market price. If the government needs drugs that are important for the society, it can equally well forcibly BUY them from the drug companies at the market price.
Its a different problem if the government wants the drugs but doesn't like paying the market price. I guess then it can seize the drugs anyway, problem solved. Just remember that if you start a business some day and make a product that the government likes, it might decide to seize it from you as well.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
First you have to find your target and you have to be able to make a lot of it to test against a lot of molecules initially. You also have to have a fast and easy way to see if anything sticks to it or not from all this screening. You also have to see if the target you picked isn't going to foul up the system in some crazy unexpected way.
Most drugs are stumbled upon by hitting some relatively similar molecule in a vast database of molecules the company has laying around from various sources.
If they don't stumble on it, they can't even begin. Then, if they do, they have to modify it to get it to work better than the simple one they stumbled upon. These modifications are mainly guesswork based on all of the possible modifications their chemists can think to try within certain limits. Then, if it does bind really well, it has to bind in the presence of everything else it would normally have to go through: other cellular components, plasma components, whole blood, liver enzymes, the works. If it sticks to any of those things or gets destroyed by the body's machinery before it can reach a concentration necessary to do whatever you want it to do from when you saw it work in the test tube...then you go back to square one or maybe two.
Then, if all of that is working, you can try some animals. If they don't die, you can try some humans. If they don't die, you can try to prove your case to the FDA. If they don't cry, you can finally sell your drug.
So, all of that has to be accomplished before you get a new chemical...and that's if you can find anything at the beginning in your vast library of options (which isn't as vast as you ever wish it would be). Otherwise, you wait for someone else to accomplish all of these things to at least somewhere around the mice...and then you buy them out. Of course, if you wait around for someone to get that far on a brand new target, you'll wait for quite a while, since most new, little guys won't have the library, manpower, capital, intelligence, or best target to even get as far as mice before going under...so there's always that problem too.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I used to be a tech at a conference center where very large companies' executives met.
It allowed me an interesting perspective, (imagine the many British period pieces you see where the nobility is carrying on their conversations in front of "The help" completely unaffected by their presence.) The tech fixing their laptop invisible to them in every way. Even if they are 1 foot away from them working on their laptop or wiring them up with a lav its like you aren't even in the room. (How you can ignore the person rummaging through your shirt and pockets is a mystery to me)
(This was the second favorite conversation I overheard there, it was carried on between two executives, right in front of me, while I was working on the microphones.)
"Everyone always thinks the scientists lead the way discovering cures and shit, but thats B.S., really we have marketing research what people are the most insecure of, what we can make the most money in treating, and then we tell the scientists to work on fixing it" (the conversation continued about what marketing looks for, wealthy and expanding demographics with certain ailments, tracking what well insured baby boomers are the most insecure of, and all the trivial things you can make a pill for, and the naivety and lack of business smarts of their scientists.) This isn't revolutionary I'm sure, but this kind of candor shocked me, These people really are as evil as people say.
(My favorite conversation were two executives talking about how they were "pumping and dumping" their own companies, firing and outsourcing as many people as they can to get short term profits up, get better bargaining power with "results" on their side, with no investments for even a few years in the future, and how great their parachute packages are. (It was a conference of executives on why CEOs are the unsung underpaid employees at a company, and about the wonders of outsourcing everything.)
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Your analogy is in error. The US Postal Service does not receive any taxpayer money to operate. This link explains how the USPS operates.>
Otherwise, I agree with you that any form of socialized medicine is undesirable. A solution to the high cost of providing medical care must be found though.
One change I'd like to see is for drug companies to stop shipping to countries that artificially keep drug prices low. Canada is a good example of that. US citizens pay, in many cases, double the price for name medications, while our friends in Canada get great discounts. Example: Diovan, a widely used medication for hypertension, is available from Canadian online pharmacies at, in some cases, less than half the price in the US. Are US citizens being gouged? Or are we subsidizing the socialist Canadian medical system, which many Canadians don't like.
I have no problem with making good medications available to those who need them. I'm just tired of foreign governments imposing their decisions on the US consumer and taxpayer.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.