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Indian Gov't Uses Special Powers To Slash Cancer Drug Price By 97%
suraj.sun sends this quote from the Times of India:
"In a landmark decision that could set a precedent on how life-saving drugs under patents can be made affordable, the government has allowed a domestic company, Natco Pharma, to manufacture a copycat version of Bayer's patented anti-cancer drug, Nexavar, bringing down its price by 97%. In the first-ever case of compulsory licensing approval, the Indian Patent Office on Monday cleared the application of Hyderabad's Natco Pharma to sell generic drug Nexavar, used for renal and liver cancer, at Rs 8,880 (around $175) for a 120-capsule pack for a month's therapy. Bayer offers it for over Rs 2.8 lakh (roughly $5,500) per 120 capsules. The order provides hope for patients who cannot afford these drugs. The approval paves the way for the launch of Natco's drug in the market, a company official told TOI, adding that it will pay a 6% royalty on net sales every quarter to Bayer."
The issue with compulsory licensing would get very muddy if Natco Pharma is allowed to export the medication outside of India's borders.
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
Realistically what are Bayer's options, how do you combat something like this? Normally things are limited by expertise or manufacturing capabilities, however, India seems to have both of these covered. I'm asking because I'm ignorant and genuinely curious. I don't fault the Indians for wanting to help their people (that's a good thing). This seems to underline the downside of Intellectual Property. I guess the another option would be to keep the formula as a trade secret, but since they didn't this (and most pharma doesn't go this route) there is probably a good reason. I guess one saving grace of the patent system is that if the domestic Indian company tries to sell outside of India there may be problems? Not to single out China, but tons of knock offs come from there too and there is little to be done about it except to all but the largest players.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Any decent chem lab can reproduce almost any drug given the patents and FDA approval documents. (Some drugs are difficult or perishable) People are responding that the big pharm companies will leave these markets, but if they do, it's unrelated to this.
R&D are sunk costs. *Any* sales over your fixed production costs results in profit. If you want to maximize profit, you sell.
What this might do, is limit the number of new drugs in the pipeline, but even that isn't a given. It's possible that (most) every good idea is being worked on, and all the great scientists are working on them. Once you've reached idea saturation, more money in a system just increases profits to the shareholders.
Wait, wait, I hear people yelling. If there's more money given to the shareholders, then they will invest in venture startups, and many more great new drugs will be discovered. Maybe. It's also possible that too much money in the drug company ecology will just lead to more viagra clones if not "snake oil" type products. More money might lead to more advertising, causing people to misuse drugs they don't really need.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Since the public has decided they do not wish to pay more taxes to education, public funding has been getting slashed over and over. So we turn to the only place we can: Companies. They are willing to give money to fund research. However they own the results when they do that.
If you don't like that I'm afraid universities will need more public funding and that means higher taxes.
why not blow 2 months salary on a 120 day supply, right?
More like 41 years' salary - FTFA: "The Bayer price of Rs 3,411,898 per year ($69,000) is more than 41 times the projected average per capita income for India in 2012, shattering any measure of affordability."
Mod parent up.
This is exactly what happened here:
"BAY 32-9006 was first developed by Onyx Pharmaceuticals. Onyx subsequently partnered with a large and well known drug company, Bayer (Bayer is the "BAY" in BAY 43-9006) to complete development of the drug."
-- http://cancerguide.org/rcc_bay43-9006.html
So this was developed by companies, not academia or the NIH.
Doing your due diligence in researching drugs is fine. Asking questions of your doctor after doing your reading is fine. Realizing that you had neglected to mention a potentially important detail is extremely valuable. I don't want to discount any of those, because they are very good things. But consumers are not meant to have any say over their prescriptions, and by that I mean that the choice of what prescription you're walking out of the doctor's office with at the end of the day should still be the doctor's and not yours (obviously you should still have the right to refuse and the right to seek a second opinion, of course).
Because of that, there's no good reason to be marketing to consumers, since the only thing you can be doing is indoctrinating an uninformed bunch of people who have no basis for understanding the complex interactions taking place and the results that might occur. For similar reasons, licensed engineers are barred from advertising in America by most of the major engineering associations. People have no basis for measuring the credibility of the claims being made, nor could they without years and years of training, so you'd be taking advantage of their cluelessness by addressing them directly.
Drug companies have zero motivation to cure illnesses. They are motivated to treat the symptoms of illnesses, and extend the lives of those people who have them while still not treating the illness itself.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The extra price you can charge above the natural market price for a product due to a monopoly is called a "monopoly rent".
Seeking to extract such a price is "rent seeking".
Patents are legally-granted monopolies.
Seeking to protect monopoly rents in one market by refusing to sell in another market because, even with the monopoly, the prices received in the second market would be so low that flow from the second market back into the first market (and flow of purchasers from the first market into the second market, which amounts to the same thing) would reduce monopoly rents in the first market is a pretty obvious example of extreme rent-seeking behavior.