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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"Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art.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."
Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug
And here I was, thinking that they were trying to patent an obscure Russian playwright.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Now if they stop granting patents on chemical compounds and their use and return to granting patents only on synthesis and novel purification methods that will be really worth cracking a bottle of bubbly.
The chemical and pharmaceutical industry happily grew to become one of the biggest contributors to developed nations GDP using only this kind of protection. It does not really need anything more. Anything more is just protectionism and racketeering.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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why can't taxes pay for medical research? (not that I trust the government that much) but it seems like it's as much in the public good as good roads.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
A thing to remember though is that the average cost of developing a new drug easily runs into hundreds of millions of dollars and that they need to make that back to stay in business.
Not that I'm against making life saving drugs available to anyone who needs them, but if that's what you want to do then everybody should bear the cost (through taxes), not just shareholders of pharmaceutical companies.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Could Antigua have produced the medicine as part of their court winnings, or is that limited to copyright only? I would love to buy exact copies of name brand drugs at their true value, while sticking it to big pharma at the same time!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Big Pharma is corrupt as all heck. They don't "research new drugs," they research how to make minor changes to existing drugs so they can re-patient. They just had an ex-industry insider (from relatively high in the ranks) condemn them to our congressmen.
Don't get me started on how much of the "research" money comes from the government.
I'll willing to accept that there might be a perfectly rational, moral reason the drugs are priced the way they are... but I haven't heard it yet.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Alternatively, philanthropic organizations could pay for the treatment of people in need, without confiscatory levels of taxes. That way both compassion and property rights can work together.
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.
I personally believe all health care, including R&D should be government ran.
That's not to say that private industry has no place in health care. I just believe the government should be at the fore front in terms of research and patient care.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The research is largely proving that the drugs are effective and safe. This costs good money, and few will do it it there's not something in it for them.
I'm not defending big pharma or any company in particular.
Your taxes already do pay for research - through NIH grants, tax breaks for pharmaceutical companies, and then after the drug is almost fully developed the government often gives the patent to an industry 'partner' to bring to market. A good example is AZT, the first ever anti-HIV medicine. The lion's share of the cost for developing AZT was paid by our tax dollars. Then Glaxo-Wellcome stepped in for the last bit and viola, they have an exclusive right to sell a life saving drug for whatever the market will bear.
From Physicians for a National Health Program's website: "15. Taxpayers pay for most research costs, and many clinical trials as well. In 2000, for example, industry spent 18% of its $13 billion for R&D on basic research, or $2.3 billion in gross costs (National Science Foundation 2003). All of that money was subsidized by taxpayers through deductions and tax credits. Taxpayers also paid for all $18 billion in NIH funds, as well as for R&D funds in the Department of Defense and other public budgets. Most of that money went for basic research to discover breakthrough drugs, and public money also supports more than 5000 clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002). Taxpayer contributions are similar in more recent years, only larger." http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/february/will_lower_drug_pric.php
So they paid 2.3 billion (tax subsidized), and we kicked in 18 billion. Then they get to charge us for access to the drugs for which we paid 95% of the basic research costs.
Though you may say that PNHP is a bunch of hippies, so if you prefer a more grandfatherly source the AARP do a decent job too: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/prescription/double_taxation.html
Of course that is the reason that while you may not trust the government, they could be a much better steward of medical research than market forces. Market based R&D is inherently morally corrupt. It can't be otherwise. If its not obvious because of the fact that more R&D is spent developing drugs to give octogenarians a hard-on and a full head of hair than to offer effective treatment for malaria that kills millions each year in the developing world, MSF gives a great summary of the reasons that market based R&D is wrong: http://www.accessmed-msf.org/main/medical-innovation/introduction-to-medical-innovation/what-is-wrong-with-r-d-today/
Though I do agree with you that at present I don't trust the government. Not that they do bad research... the NIH and the researchers they fund are amazing. But I don't trust the corrupt system that gives the breakthrough drugs that the government develops into the hands of private industry so that they can extort millions of Americans for the price that the 'market will bear' for drugs they may need to survive.
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.
A thing to remember though is that the average cost of developing a new drug easily runs into hundreds of millions of dollars and that they need to make that back to stay in business.
This is why they struggle so hard, quote: " In 2001, the ten American drug companies in the Fortune 500 list (not quite the same as the top ten worldwide, but their profit margins are much the same) ranked far above all other American industries in average net return, whether as a percentage of sales (18.5 percent), of assets (16.3 percent), or of shareholders' equity (33.2 percent). These are astonishing margins. For comparison, the median net return for all other industries in the Fortune 500 was only 3.3 percent of sales. Commercial banking, itself no slouch as an aggressive industry with many friends in high places, was a distant second, at 13.5 percent of sales." (emphasis mine)
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I know that Big Pharma just keeps patenting similar drugs, the big question is why we don't get new breakthrough drugs from other companies?
Because it's damned expensive and takes a long time to prove to the FDA and society-leeching lawyers that a product is (relatively) safe.
Besides, most (all?) of the low-hanging fruit have been picked. It takes a lot of effort to climb to the top of the tree and hunt for edible fruit.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The way drugs (or anything else) are priced has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with market forces. If the pharma companies are corrupt, "don't research new drugs" or set the drug prices too high, then why not start a pharma company that isn't corrupt, does research new drugs and sells drugs at lower prices? That way you can put them all out of business.
Yes, I know you can't start a drug company but that's beside the point. Somebody would.
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
They are also more concerned with making drugs that temporarily alleviate symptoms, rather than drugs which actually cure the ailment.
Being commercial businesses that need to make profit for their shareholders, it is far more profitable to sell someone a cocktail of drugs that only alleviate some of the symptoms, such that the patient has to keep using them indefinitely, rather than providing a cure...
A cured patient will buy the cure once, and then not need any more drugs...
A patient still suffering will continue to buy the drugs that temporarily alleviate some of his symptoms for the rest of his life.
If one of these companies discovered a cure to AIDS, they would keep it to themselves. If they released it they would make a lot of short term profit, that is until AIDS was completely eradicated, at which point they would no longer be able to make any profit from AIDS sufferers.
It's also in their interests to make drugs with side effects, so that they can sell additional drugs to combat the side effects.
Commercial pharmaceutical research is completely corrupt by it's very nature, the goals of a commercial business are completely at odds with the patient's needs.
Pharmaceutical research should be performed by government and charities, with full accountability and no commercial bias. It is in the interest of government to have a healthy populace, as unhealthy citizens don't earn any money for the country... Even more so in a country with nationalised healthcare, as unhealthy citizens are an additional burden. If a national healthcare system could put AIDS sufferers on a short course of drugs so they could continue to live a healthy life after a month or two of treatment, instead of feeding them expensive drugs for 30-40 years until they die, the healthcare system would benefit greatly.
Pharmaceutical companies should be relegated to lowest-bidder manufacturing of publicly available drugs.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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!
That's ridiculous. Drugs are not priced based on market forces. In fact, there are no market forces. Assuming you have insurance, then the drug's cost to you is not the real cost - nor is the "market" price related to the cost to the company. Amgen and Roche are in a battle over dialysis drugs. With kickbacks, reimbursement rates, and other strange financial dealings, the prices become complicated. Look at Genentech too. Their main competitor to Lucentis, their drug for wet age-related macular degeneration, is Avastin, another one of their drugs! Yet Lucentis costs about 40 times as much as Avastin. That has nothing to do with the market. So what do they do? They try to prevent ophthalmologists from purchasing Avastin to use as treatment for AMD, by halting sales to compounding pharmacies.
The barrier to entry is also extremely high (though this might be necessary to ensure there aren't fakes). As a patient, you have little choice. Do you honestly shop around for the cheapest doctors when it comes time for surgery? You don't have much say in what the doctor will order for you, and you have essentially no say in who your anesthesiologist will be.
This is what publicly-funded research is supposed to be for.
- Uncle Sam is scared of Big Business. (More properly, the weasels that make up Uncle Sam are scared of losing Big Business' money)
- AIDS is overblown. WHO reported ~17k AIDS deaths in the US for 2005. US Census reported ~300mill Americans, making it a pretty low priority illness, even though it's nasty and fatal. ~0.006% of the population is statistically insignificant, sad to say.
- Most AIDS victims get themselves infected through willing sexual contact. While that shouldn't matter for getting help to people, the fact is that it's more difficult to muster sympathy for illnesses that people inflict upon themselves.
Sad thing about the federal government stepping in to deal with it is that there just aren't enough people dying to get those on the Hill to take any real action. The mandate from the people isn't there, they don't want to touch Big Business, for fear of fucking up the economy and dozens of other reasons that should pale in comparison to people dying. It's not fair and it sucks, but that's life.The World's Worst Webcomic!
And to answer your question, there were ~46k new diagnosed AIDS cases and ~38k new diagnosed HIV cases in 2005. High mortality rate, but the percent of infected are still low enough to prevent the average person from knowing many, if any of them, making it "someone else's problem" in their minds. The old adage "out of sight, out of mind" is still true.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Hell, more gross profit than the bankers?
Either the pharmaceutical companies are all run by geniuses, or there's a serious imbalance that should be corrected by the government - I'd be inclined to levy a windfall tax just to see the bastards squirm.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
When is the last time an entertainer went out of their way to target massive ad campaigns to the entire nation in an attempt to make every last citizen buy their drugs because they must have something wrong with them after listing every symptom known to man? If you don't get the point he's trying to make and see some of the bullshit the pharmaceutical industry has been pulling then I don't know what to tell you.
It's simple enough: Have mandatory limits on how much pharma companies can spend on marketing. For prescription medications, do not allow companies to advertise directly to the public. Limit how much kickbacks the companies can give Doctors/Hospitals/etc.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
So you're saying the guy owning the property should be allowed to keep the property, and then build his part of the railroad. After that he'll charge what ever the market can bear in toll?
- These characters were randomly selected.
There are no double blinded controlled studies of AIDS drugs that have actually proven, using clinical endpoints, that taking an AIDS drugs will extend your life a single day. The "fast track" approval process for AIDS drugs is farce, driven by the political pressure to "do something!", and nothing like the process that a heart medication for the general population has to go through.
If you have trouble seeing that, then I doubt anyone can successfully explain it to you.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
With nothing more than varying the compression of the pill, or using a time release method developed in the 50's mostly involving coating half of a capsules content in wax -- companies have claimed new patients for a variety of pain drugs. With every single one of them being extremely old substances, well out of any patent on any country laws on earth.
Having achieved these patents with no more innovation than a few simple blood plasma level tests, and a few grand for a better pill press. The drug companies have proceeded to mark up the same substances 160,000%, 500,000%, 110,000%, 57,000%, 84,000% respectively for the top selling compounds. Even the illegal drugs markets for cocaine & heroin do not achieve these levels of markup in any form.
Similarly, the markup in generic versions of the few of these pain killers which have become generic is a startling 6000% above costs by the time they hit retail.
I feel so served by this regulation, let me tell you. I love government intervention in my ability to buy drugs. If they were so careless as to allow me to purchase directly from the manufacturer, I might be able to do such horrible things as buy a year and half worth for less than $25 instead of $740.00 a month for a single RX from community pharmacy. Absolute horror.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
You should want Pharma's profits to be high so the investor money will flow there, instead of to oil stocks or gold. You do know that it takes 10 years and up to a billion dollars US to bring a drug to market. There has to be a pot at the end of the rainbow or investors won't invest! That's how it works, and while not perfect, it is a hell of a lot more efficient than shaking tax dollars out of people and filtering it through the federal bureaucracy. Compare the US Postal Service to UPS or FedEx and you'll see the same thing. Yep, the government does everything else so well, let's hand over this to them too!
Go ahead, take away their patents or institute price controls, and watch the money dry up. That will help everyone...not! You can't force investors to invest, no matter how much compulsion or Robin Hood economics you want to institute.
I just wish someone would make a list of the top 50 drugs in the last 50 years and who made them and how they were financed. I'm guessing it wasn't from a communist country.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Ok, then we circumvent the whole financial risk model and let the government assume the risk (once the budget is balanced). In exchange for developing the drug, the company makes a very modest stipend above their research costs (which are made 100% transparent & public). Once a drug passes testing and is approved, the company earns a large financial bonus and a small stipend whenever the drug is produced. If the pharmacy research company also manufacturers drugs, they are given preferred contracts to produce at-or-slightly-above market price.
This way the government -- aka, the people -- own the rights to the drug. The pharmacy companies still make money, and everyone can be happy.
As long as they haven't had kids yet, I'm all for that. Darwin and all.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The academic medical center lab I work in is trying to develop a new cancer therapeutic. We'll be starting up phase I (toxicity) clinical trials soon. The reason academia (what the NIH funds) can't completely bring a new drug to market is multifactorial: It's pretty much impossible to get much past a phase II (dosing and efficacy) trial in academics because phase III (therapeutic vs. gold standard) trials usually take thousands of patients and years to complete and are as expensive as hell. Even if you can get past phase III (and it takes up to 15 years and half a billion dollars from when something works in the lab until it's routinely given to patients), we still can't manufacture therapeutics on a large (commercial) scale in the lab. Part of the reason we use industry to bring therapeutics we've developed to market is that we are just not (in academics) set up to do it on our own. I don't particularly like working with private companies but we really have no other option.
Perhaps the NIH should buy a small generic pharmaceutical producer to make the drugs we develop. The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available. Yes, there will be unforeseen toxicities associated with the therapeutics that we don't know about because we've only used the therapeutic on a couple of hundred people, but how many people are dying/suffering large morbidity because it takes that extra ten years to get a therapeutic to market?
When HIV and AIDS were first discovered, and the epidemic that was unleashed started, the life expectancy of the unfortunate recipient was about 10 - 15 years. Now, however, after only 10 years of drugs and healthcare being on the market, life expectancy is much, much better. How are these drugs making people's condition worse? Is living a worse fate than dying?
And you can't tell me that all those people who are now surviving the various types of cancer that would have died just 20 years ago is proof that people are being denied healthcare and drugs. People that would have died 20 years ago are now living full, happy lives. Well, not happy, that that's another story about how people were lied to 50 years ago about having flying cars now. On second thought, where are the flying cars...
But I digress. Seriously, for all of Big Pharma's flaws, they do help people. Medicines do cost a ton of money to research, develop, test, retest, go through FDA testing, test one more time for good measure, and finally release. Plus, after releasing the drug, more testing is done through the doctors prescribing it, as well as the company having to spend money to get the word out. Yes, advertising. It is part of it. The best wonder drug in the world won't work if nobody knows about it.
Plus, part of those high costs are for all the research on drugs that didn't work. Just because a drug is researched and millions spent on it doesn't mean it will ever get to market. One hiccup along the way can be enough to send the companies back to the drawing board. On the topic of this, costs are also raised when the company has to basically protect itself financially from when a drug reacts poorly with someone, they die, and the company is sued. Sure, it may have worked on 99,999 other people, but one wrongful death lawsuit can set a company back millions of dollars.
Last, but not least, when a drug doesn't work, it is not a complete loss. The company then knows what won't work. They can still salvage research from the drug, how it affected the virus/bacteria, and move on from there. Storage of these maybe-medicines can't be cheap, what with regulating everything from temperature and humidity to making sure that the computer backups of the backups are always up and running, because if these people lose files, it isn't just the courts they have to worry about, it is also the fact that people can die from lack of information. So their systems have to be top notch at all times. That isn't cheap.
Oh, and one last thing. As much as everyone demonizes Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does do a lot to help people. Just because his business practices weren't always on the up and up doesn't mean he's a total loss in the way of morality.
I know that I just lost half the support of Slashdot when I wrote that last comment. Oh well. Can't win them all.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
One of the real problems here is the Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980, which allowed publicly funded researchers (including universities) to patent or otherwise own the intellectual property rights of inventions funded by your tax dollars and mine.
Before 1980, companies had to do all the research work themselves. If they were assisted by a university's research lab, and if that lab were funded by the Federal government, then intellectual property rights would be held by the government. If Whatsamatta U discovered how to synthesize an enzyme, for instance, no one could ever patent that process. The fruits of publicly funded research were public.
After Bayh-Doyle, everything changed. Universities could patent their publicly funded discoveris, so they were free to enter into partnerships with corporations - the universities, funded by the government, do the lion's share of research. The corporations figure out how to turn discoveries into marketable goods. Everyone wins - except for the people who actually paid for the research in the first place: US taxpayers.
I don't know if you folks caught this in the U.S., since it was a Canadian study, but earlier this month a report in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal showed that U.S. drug companies are spending twice as much on marketing as on research. Here's the report from the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2008/01/03/drugs.html
It is evil because the big pharma corporations call themselves "ethical companies" to distinguish themselves from generic pharmaceutical companies, who are presumably "unethical" by bringing low cost generic drugs onto the market, to give people affordable alternatives. If they proclaim themselves to be "ethical" the should behave ethically and try to produce drugs that are urgently needed. Instead of searching for the next big lifestyle drug that reduces your long term chance of getting a disease by a few percent they should be developing drugs like new antibiotics where because of the spread of disease resistance there is the need for new defences. However since antibiotics are delivered for a course of treatment lasting a few weeks rather than for a lifetime with the "lifestyle" drugs they are less profitable.
As for "what others want instead of what you consider best for society", consider this - these companies receive special privileges from society that give them guaranteed monopolies for decades, called patents. In return society has a right to expect them to use those privileges ethically.
It's also good news for the US which needs this drug to be cheap. AIDS patients aren't earning a lot of money while on this therapy, and their other medical care costs a lot of money. Either them directly, or their insurance corps which mark up the payout and charge the rest of us who haven't (yet) needed the drugs.
--
make install -not war
You're saying that they can't give more money to advertising companies? Okay, so maybe they could keep the money themselves.
While we're at it, we should limit the amount of technical hardware that they can purchase. We should also limit the amount of software [perhaps 1 terabyte or 1000 software packages, whichever is least; each bash script or JavaScript file counts as 1 package]. We should also limit the amount of computer experts. We should limit the amount of paper that they use. We should limit the amount of seats that they use, in case productivity increases. We should limit the amount of desks too. We should limit the amount of toilet flushes, as well.
I can honestly agree with what you said about prescriptions and kickbacks, but I can't understand what you would want to limit anything else. Limits rarely bring more products to market at a cheaper price. I can't think of any situation like that, off the top of my head.
testing out my trending skills
The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available.
I'll agree about speeding up the process in some respects, but we're deathly afraid of more Vioxx type disasters. And Vioxx is only the latest of drugs withdrawn - remember thalidomide and birth defects?
We need to find a balance, maybe not where we are, but there has to be a balance.
I don't read AC A human right
It can be misleading to take financial data from a single year. Were any important drugs introduced around that time? For instance, Viagra reached $1 billion in sales around 1999 and only "went up" from there. Pharmaceuticals is one of those industries where you have a few HUGE sellers that account for most of the profit, then the patent expires and you have some lean years.
2001 was obviously a bad year for certain industries (airlines, tech companies) so maybe that had an effect as well.