India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery

sas-dot writes "India today launched a unique collaborative programme to discover drugs for infectious diseases common to the developing countries. The 'Open Source Drug Discovery' (OSDD) programme, launched by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), aims to build a consortium of global researchers and bypass the patent regime, which makes drugs expensive." Of course, all those pesky research, development and liability costs help, too.

Comments

Re:fp

[boarder8925]

Hopefully OSSD will soon find a cure for braindead first posts . . . .

Twice as much on marketing

[jamie]

the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development

Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds, Jan. 7, 2008

Re:Twice as much on marketing

[mdfst13]

Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.

Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States

I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.

They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.

The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.

Re:Twice as much on marketing

[mdfst13]

Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.

And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.

Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They used it as a promotion.

The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D. That that's why drugs are so expensive. Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate), I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion. They are more a side effect of promotion IMO than a main component.

Re:Twice as much on marketing

[Halo1]

And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.

If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.

Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)

Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.

Obviously, medicins that are more successful (as in: more people buy them, not necessarily "more effective") may be sold cheaper than the rest since they can make the same profits in aggregate anyway. That's a general business principle, and marketing (including handing out free samples) may be one way to get there.

That does not mean that the best marketed product is also the best product though, nor that overall prices will be lower than if less money were spent on marketing by all parties involved and some other product got very popular for whatever reason.

The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D.

No, the basic complaint is that drug companies always justify their needs for continuation patents, shaky lawsuits against generic medicin companies, high prices, patents on research largely performed by/in cooperation with public institutions, etc., by their huge R&D budgets. When it then turns out that they spend more on marketing than on R&D, I think it's logical that people are a bit miffed.

After all, they appear to need all that money more for marketing than for R&D. And if that's the case, overall healthcare quality may actually be better served with less exclusivity.

I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion

Yes, it's clear you like the pharma industry a lot and want to discredit that study as much as possible, but I've seen more disingenuous hand waving and armchair economic reasoning from you in these two posts than in that entire study. For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").

Sounds like a good idea, but..

[Chris Rhodes]

If it is truly open, won't corps just follow the research then throw money into their own labs at the end of the project? Then they could patent the chemical.

How it works

It seems to me that the project could be leeched off of fairly easily. E.g., at work package 10.

Other than that, it is the inevitable result of high prices and monopolies. Open source, coops, public libraries; they all exist to let a larger group of people get access to limited resources for less. That's an interesting article.

Re:Sounds like a good idea, but..

[invisiblerhino]

Well, if they want to do it right, they should just patent the drugs and then not enforce the patent. For two reasons. A) This is morally a good thing. B) It would drive the pharmaceuticals companies crazy.

Isn't that the strangest thing going?

[WindBourne]

Big Drugs all grip that RD form the bulk of their costs and that is why they have heavy mark-ups. But in the end, it is one of the lowest parts. In fact, they spend more money on lobbying FDA, white house, and congress than they do on RD.

DRM

[conureman]

It will be interesting to see how the multinational drug rights management folks can kibosh this. U.N. sanctions?

Clinical

[Anonymous Coward]

For development, yes, this might work. However, much of the cost in bringing a drug to market (not marketting it, just getting it ready) is in the clinical studies side. You have to buy the animals to test it in, you have to pay people to test it in safety studies and efficacy studies, plus the doctors and physicians to monitor them over long periods of time. etc..

Meanwhile, a company pours money into optimizing the production strain; fine-tuning the media and culturing methods (assuming biologics rather than small molecule therapeutics) so that they're stable and suitable for large scale production. It's a time and money intensive process.

For initial research, some discussion would be helpful, perhaps for production as well (but the choice of host strain, inducers, and vectors can all radically affect this as well). For the clinical side, there are no shortcuts. If someone in your study dies - even for unrelated causes - most big pharma would rather shut down the whole project than run the financial and publicity risk of having a recall years later. FDA regulations on NDAs and the like offer no shortcuts; so open-sourcing it won't help.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

Yes but mostly No

[Chris Rhodes]

The geographical location of the patent (U.S., Europe or China) will exclude foreign companies who are infringing. India can always complain and/or challenge the patents, but first they'll be excluded from some of the biggest markets in the world.

Also, India is pro-patent when it comes to pharmaceuticals. So it is just as likely that Indian companies will leech off this research. Remember that it is the actual drug molecule that is patented.

Take for example, escitalopram and citalopram, escitalopram is an enantiomer of citalopram. Escitalopram is patented by Forest Labs, and marketed as Lexapro. Lexapro was created and patented by Forest Labs (lundbeck) because citalopram (Celexa) lost its patent in 2003. Both drugs were designed to treat major depression and generalized anxiety disorder.

It isn't the research that gets patented. It is the drug. In the case of citalopram and escitalopram, two drugs that are merely stereoisomers (mirror images.)