Slashdot Mirror
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"Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art.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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.