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Indian Supreme Court Denies Novartis Cancer Drug Patent
beltsbear writes "Following a reasonable view of drug patents, the Indian courts have decided that making small changes to an existing patented drug are not worthy of a new patent. This ruling makes way for low cost Indian cancer drugs that will save lives. From the Article: 'Novartis lost a six-year legal battle after the court ruled that small changes and improvements to the drug Glivec did not amount to innovation deserving of a patent. The ruling opens the way for generic companies in India to manufacture and sell cheap copies of the drug in the developing world and has implications for HIV and other modern drugs too.'"
Innovation to these people is a specially shaped shit in the streets. They don't respect intellectual property as they're a nation of rote learners at best, thieves at worst.
Now this is a good april fools joke - it's almost believable - until they come to the part about a reasonable court.
Well I imagine that if these small changes are not enough to get a new patent, then they are saying that this new variation of the old drug falls under the protection of the old drug.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
A 30 day supply of 400mg tabs of Gleevec (imatinib sulfate) runs a lil over 6 thousand dollars. That's right, 6k a month to keep patients with CML, HES and certain stomach cancers alive. It's gone up over 2 thousand a month in the last 3 years alone.
If you have insurance, good insurance, you might pay around 50 bucks of that a month. Without insurance, you get to use prednisone til it or the cancer kills you.
Way to go pharmaceutical companies... and do you really think they are working on a cure when they can rake in thousands of dollars a month from each and every cancer patient??? Yeah right... think again... If they understand the cancer well enough to halt it in it's tracks for 90 to 95% of the patients that are treatable by this drug, and another 90 to 95 of those that take it are alive and in full remission 5+ years later, they certainly know enough to track down a cure if they were so inclined to do so.
Greedy bastards...
Without the big investment by the pharmaceutical companies, new drugs would not have existed in the first place. It is a high-risk and high-reward business. However extorting dying patients is a bit morally questionable. But hey, we live in a society where everything can be measured by money.
Having said that, I think if the modification is small, and the investment into this new modification is small, then patent shouldn't be granted. I hope India doesn't end up with U.S's patenting culture, where the rounded corner on a phone can be patented.
This doesn't make sense to me. If they make a small change, the small change should be patentable -- but that should in no way effect the extent of the patent on the original formulation. In other words, patenting the small change shouldn't stop anybody from copying the original drug. And if the "small change" actually makes a real difference in effectiveness, isn't that an argument that it _should_ be patentable?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Can this combine with the "Doctrine of First Sale" case by the Supreme Court a few weeks ago about the textbooks bought in Thailand and sold in the USA? Then, instead of having USA-citizens buying cheap pharma-drugs from Canadian pharmacies, they could buy the cheap generic versions from Indian pharmacies.
:>)
Someone could start a business importing the generics from India and selling them here in the USA legally, rather than those generics being a "gray market" product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_market (interestingly, the USA wikipedia uses the British spelling for grey, eh? How hoity-toity!)
Ok, the court did not think it was innovative enough, but I don't understand why this should affect the expiry of the patent of the previous version f the drug.
That should expire regardless, shouldn't it ?
If so, they could make generics from the previously expiring one.
There's something I don't understand about the evergreening of the patent. If someone can explain, thanks.
That's the correct spelling for grey to you, colonist.
Actually, Wikipedia doesn't have a USA version, it has an English version.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Now, NOVARTIS will start making generics.
Generic drugs made by third parties are sorely needed by non G8 nations across the world. Indian companies are the leaders in making generics....like Chinese companies in making electronics / hardware. The argument of multinationals pharma companies like NOVARTIS claims the high cost of R & D for inventing new drugs for keeping up the high price. This has been debunked by the report on TIME (and many other sources) which proved the same drug or treatments costs vary highly depending on who pays. And such costs are amortized from G8 nations itself. Also none of these companies are making any losses in their balance sheet whatsoever...what they demand is permanent 'rent seeking'.
Today's TIME has an OPED by their Delhi correspondent with grave warnings on future of Indian pharma - the type of warnings issued by World Bank / IMF / West on Developing countries - basically on the lines on "do as I say, not as I do". I guess NOVARTIS marketing droids called TIME headquarters and asked them to run a sympathetic piece. We are talking about a company with $54 billion sales and $9 billion plus profit in 2012! Imagine their power. And now imagine the 'purported losses' on a few drugs going out of patent in developing countries - it will be negligible at best.
There is no way any Indian - except for the 2-3% of the elite - can afford a $2600 ~ Rs 130000 / - cost for a month long treatment. This is a country with no health social safety net other than public medical colleges and affordable primary health care facilities and medicines. (Private Health Insurance is a new phenomenon, slowly catching on, the advantages and disadvantages we know...we have to look at USA.)
The only argument which can be made against Indian generics - "if you can't afford the drug, why don't you suffer the consequences". I guess even the most hard nosed penny pinching corporate drone is not THAT heartless.
Instead of fighting the generic manufacturers, NOVARTIS should create their own special generic versions and beat them on a price point. But the suits running the show looked at some powerpoint and decided, lets first fight, if we lose start making generics.
Tat Tvam Asi
The ROT13 and other April fools crap is over with. That was really annoying. Someone needs a stern talking to about what "obnoxious" means.
"Evergreening"
This is a process where pharma companies make teeny weeny changes to compound and get a new patent, bypassing the 20 year limit on patents. Indian law(thankfully) does not allow "Evergreening". Patents cannot be issued on "new versions" or "slight changes".
The courts are very sensitive to this, and will not allow pharma companies to get away.
What this ruling has done is that many more common drugs can now be sold as generics. Cancer is a relatively rare disorder, but there are other more common diseases where patented drugs are very expensive.
With this ruling generics will get a big boost. Not only that, there is a push by the govt to prevent doctors from recommending "brands" and recommend generic brand name drugs which are 1/10 the cost, or even cheaper.
There has been lot of pressure by the WTO to allow corporate to plunder the masses, but the govt has held out on its own. There are many things wrong with India. Thankfully. patent system as it stands today is not one of the things wrong!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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Sorry, mate, we're the Revolutionaries in the former colony. Your King George lost the war. :>)
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Damn you for being right about the "English" language, though. And you forgot to rub it in by using the word color with the Brit-spelling "colour". (jk. IAAA = i am an anglophile)
Mhmm. Ever hear the story of why Aluminum is spelled differently (and wrongly) in the UK despite it being named there? The reasoning was that the scientific spelling didn't sound British enough- and they say the Americans are the arrogant ones.
You're trying to talk sense to someone who thinks "American" is a language.
The word I'd normally use to describe such an exercise is, "futile".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is the BS line pharma companies would like to feed you. Much of the research happens in conjunction with universities.
Pharma companies are always in for a "maintenance" cure. They do not want the permanent cure. Corporations exist for profit, and if they get less profit, it will mean a 50,000$ car instead of a 1000000$ supercar.
But just like the MAFIAA they would like you to believe that they are some kind of angels looking over starving millions.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
From the article that you linked to "A grey market or gray market, also known as parallel market,..." - It seems that the English version of the page that you cite is quite clear that there are 2 ways of spelling the word. I am British and when I write on that site I write in English and point out alternative spelling just as this writer has. There is nothing wrong with the page that you link to.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Greetings, across-the-ponder. I only said that it was "interesting", not that it was wrong. I assume that the Great Edit Wars of the '00s (the Twenty-O-O's) and the Great Revert Battles of Wikipedia of 2010 saw much churning both within the article and in the title itself. The skies must have been filled with the e's and the a's being catapulted back and forth as the Revolutionary Forces and the east-of-the-pond residuals of the once Mighty Empire hurled vowels and invective and inflections (and once, there was a stray umlaut as a German took part in a strange time-traveling-unterseeboot up-periscoping) at each other. It's been a lone holdout, that one wikipedia article entitled "Grey Market", that outpost holding onto that grey, grey spelling.
;>)
Birds do it, spelling bees do it, let's fall in . . . loove !
Delurking for the first time in a long time to say this: to the lowest hell with the people whose greed will let them watch other humans suffer, wither, and die for want of these drugs. "Evergreening" is scum and in a better world would be felonious.
We must have a change of heart as a race. We must ask, "is money for humankind, or is humankind for money?" Especially in a global economy full of floating currencies, money only has value while it has velocity, as one cannot see the wind but only feel its effects.
India has the potential to be a world leader in sustainability...or it may become a living nightmare zone with a population of billions. Only the decisions made deep in the hearts of those in power will tell, and the consequences will spiral out into eternity.
Patents on new drugs make sense. When these patents expire, the companies try to find some way to re-patent the drug. Too often, the change is from "take 2 25mg tablets twice a day" to "take 1 50mg tablet twice a day". In other words, the changes often really have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual active ingredient being delivered. Instead of capsules, the drug become a tablet; instead of a syrup it's now a capsule.
This case seems to be even more egregious, because Novartis did not even develop the original drug. Novartis patented their particular formulation, and hoped to use this to prevent anyone else from manufacturing competing formulations. They presumably purchased marketing rights from the drug developer, but I haven't been able to find the details. In any case, India's court has simply said that other companies can also produce the drug, and sell it in their own formulations.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Who said that, exactly? Or did you just make that up? I think you did...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"I would expect all of the other drug companies to also want a piece of that pie. That means they have to come up with something that works better."
If the motive is profit then a cure isn't a 'better' outcome. The better solution here is to reduce their patent protection till they *need* to push forward with research to survive. For patents to work, they need to be at the MINIMUM required for any market. Longer than the minimum and they slow development down.
"You are vastly, massively underestimating the complexity of cancer and of the human biology."
He's pretty much judged the drug company motivation right though, hasn't he? They have a monopoly, courtesy of patents, on their respective fields. In that case they have no incentive to push forward. If Novartis had to make a new better cancer drug every few years then the rate of development would increase enormously. Over zealous patent regimes are what's holding back drugs, Novartis can coast for quite a while now.
For Novartis, they'll make the next drug, and move it very slowly to market if their competitors come up with one. That way they can make full use of the patent length.
And of course see the British spelling for other metals - sodum, potassum, et.c., and also the British spelling for a certain part of the head is cranum. Sheer arrogance.
I actually spit my coffee out at this! Please tell me this was late for April fool, quite possibly the funniest thing I've read this year!!
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
interestingly, the USA wikipedia uses the British spelling for grey, eh? How hoity-toity!
Implication that there is a whole different wikipedia site catering for American spelling and grammar. Hilarious in itself.
Who said that, exactly? Or did you just make that up? I think you did...
Indirectly, I think they did
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
There are millions who cannot afford the exorbitant prices charged by large pharma companies. It is a fact that they will die or suffer a lot if they dont get these drugs. The right question is whether we want them to die or suffer. Pharma companies need to work out their financial and business plans by taking this question into consideration. They cannot ignore this question because they do not live in a perfect worlds.
The statement that this will kill innovation is wrong. Irrespective of the supreme court ruling in India...these millions are NOT going to buy the drugs at the exorbitant prices at which these large pharma companies sell simply because they don't have that kind of money. So this ruling does not impact their finance and hence their innovation in any way.
And if I don't make stuff, I don't make money.
If that stuff is drugs, I can still make money, even if I don't get dibs on the patent for it. How much LESS money would Novartis make if they shut shop? Nil.
And, given drug companies spend more on marketing than r&d, they can AT LEAST halve their required payments to non-optional buyers.
In developing countries like India, a lot of people die much earlier due to lack of healthcare. Diseases like malaria, dengue, JE etc., are very common. Parasitic infections are also high on body count. Many for the want of cheap medicine which the developed world can take for granted.
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Big Pharma is a gigantic example of market failure. Easiest way to take care of this problem is to create a network of government/nonprofit drug design centres around the world, impose an R&D levy on all medication, and the contract out the manufacturing to the cheapest bidder.
"\People motivated to find cures (become famous, tenure at a major university..."
I think you'll find money is the motivation there too. People don't spend a fortune going through Uni to be famous, they do so for money.
Novartis owns their inventions and controls the spending on which ones, and the rate it pushes each to market.
Novartis maximizes profits, because that's what companies do.
The patent system is such that they don't have to compete with themselves, if a research department comes up with a cure for cancer, they don't need to push that to market because it would damage their current product line.
The fix for that is to force shorter patents, the companies profit margin will be squeeze and it will become like the rest of industry, a competitive treadmill, exactly as markets are supposed to be. Patents currently are way too long and distort that treadmill.
"and do you really think they are working on a cure when they can rake in thousands of dollars a month from each and every cancer patient??? Yeah right... think again... If they understand the cancer well enough to halt it in it's tracks for 90 to 95% of the patients that are treatable by this drug, and another 90 to 95 of those that take it are alive and in full remission 5+ years later, they certainly know enough to track down a cure if they were so inclined to do so."
A post has on Slashdot been moderated +5 Informative containing an explicit and unambiguous assertion that the pharmaceutical industry would be able to cure cancer completely if they wanted to do so, but they don't want to do so because they would make less money from it. +5 Informative is the highest score that can be given to a post.
Democracy has been failing a lot in in the more recent years and I'm not sure what to do about it.
USA Wikipedia does exist !! http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
American is probably already a language. It's really a matter of debate as to when exactly to call it a new language. But, it will happen, if it hasn't already. By your reasoning, Dutch and Afrikaans don't exist because they'd both be German.
Considering that American English is the dominant form of English, that's the correct way of doing it. It's more likely for random people to know American English idiosyncrasies than British English ones. And what's more, American English is somewhat easier to learn than British English as we've fixed a lot of the weirdness with British English.
Positive paradigm shifts in the corporate world a boon to humanity.
Positive paradigm shifts in the corporate world positively impacts immensely the quality of both the environment and human life.
This has been visible in the past four decades at least in two areas mentioned below.
1] Modern concept of corporate social responsibility either done voluntarily or enforced by the state is a good thing and that is being followed mostly by big MNCs and all other big and responsible business enterprises.
2] Similarly there is a mounting awareness as well as activist induced concerns towards the welfare of the environment.
Slowly but steadily on these two areas there have been a marked improvements in the past three decades compared to total lack of concern for such things prior to that.
In fact in many parts of the world where the government failed it was the responsible and generous sponsorship of corporate houses that have helped many human beings get basic health care, education and other fundamental human needs.
But having deservingly praised the corporate world for its positive contribution in these areas, there is a major unfulfilled area of concern and if only the collective wisdom of the corporate world can pledge to get the complaints in that area too addressed positively in the interests of human race at large then history will remember such corporate houses and human race would be always grateful for such activities.
I shall come to what it is but before that I would like to make an appeal that this has to be addressed purely in the interests of human race at large and not commercial considerations or legal rights and wrongs. This can be debated and as history has shown many instances where the common good of human race prevailed over all other considerations be it the consideration of interests of a specific nation or a specific profession or specific ideology etc
What I am talking about is doing away with Intellectual Property rights and its off springs Patents, Copy Rights, Trade mark, Trade Secrets to name a few.
Fortunately the UN day of Intellectual Property Rights too falls in the near future on 26th April 2013. So we can start the debate. Please try to go through the entire article for the sake of Humanity.
If this happens then probably we would be rewriting the history of world economy.
I am not a lawyer. What I am going to write may sound high flown philosophical and idealistic but practically not viable. However, that does not stop me from putting forth certain questions that have been bothering me for a very long time regarding the very legitimacy of Intellectual Property Rights and its off springs Patents, Copy Rights, Trade mark, Trade Secrets to name a few.
In evolutionary biology we find that all creations have shed the unnecessary parts or shrunk them for better survival; in evolutionary sociology too human race has shed too many models of social groups and narrowed down on a few that would be easier for global interaction; in languages too, from a few thousands languages that existed humanity has reduced the number to just a few hundred languages. Similarly there is nothing wrong in giving up in the interest of evolution of human race, of course against the interest of a few lawyers who mostly benefit from such laws, we can think of doing away with this whole set of laws connected with Intellectual property.
What is Intellectual property (IP)? It basically refers to creations of the mind. Who is the owner of anyone’s mind? Mind [ a difficult term to define] like everything else in life is a product of evolution and in its course of evolution it is inevitably interdependent and interacts with all other minds either obviously or otherwise, with itself at varying levels of potency based on different levels of perceiving and performing capacities at different times. Besides whether we believe in it or not, it is always aided by a universal mind which works through every individual mind at various frequencies depending upon various factors like readin
Good to see that the reason is properly highlight, i.e, small modification to original drug did not qualify as a new innovation. There are some news sites i visited, where it is incorrectly implied that the verdict denied patent to a completely new medicine.
I am completely against all patents and copyrights.
However as long as patents and copyrights exist, I am for making everybody as aware of them as possible, so I would be that "hard nosed penny pinching corporate drone" in your estimation then, saying: fuck them, they want to support governments that create the monopolies in the market by issuing patents, then let them suffer the consequences.
India is doing the right thing in 1 instance, while doing the wrong thing in all the other instances of patents and copyrights, they should completely abolish the idea of government protection to any monopoly, regardless if they are an inventor or copyright holder, it's irrelevant.
There should be one way in the free market to keep your secrets: keep your secrets. Don't disclose any information about the process, the details of manufacturing, etc., keep your secret that way, not with gov't creating an unnatural advantage by law. Trade secrets and being first to market, that's all you would have in a free market.
BUT governments also shouldn't be forcing companies to spend extraordinary amounts of money artificially to come to market to comply with nonsensical shit that FDA forces companies to comply with, which only allows the biggest companies to put forward new drugs and procedures because it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and years to comply with all the nonsense (beyond the general testing for harm that could be done by the drugs), I am talking about "evidence of effectiveness".
One thing is to show that a drug is safe or at least list its side effects, the other thing is to have an expensive and prolonged study of effectiveness, where in reality the market would be doing it much faster and with no expense to the company, but allowing it to bring the medication to the market quickly and much cheaper.
You can't handle the truth.
No, of course not. For YOUR safety, the USA federal government MUST make it illegal to re-import prescription drugs and medical devices!
How anyone can believe that people in Washington DC have a desire to make healthcare "affordable" is beyond me.
Goverment should do research and make the formula publicly available so no more patents are offered on life saving drugs. --I am not a socialist
...your tax dollars hard at work....
A blow to Big Pharma. Keep them coming.
needs to be nationalized and subsidized heavily for the greater good of those in need. People need to get to the point where the idea of medicine and profit as bedfellows needs to end. For-profit medicine was and never will be a good idea. The ability (or inability) of someone to pay for their medical needs should not be a factor in the quality of care they receive.
Things that I feel should be heavily subsidized and/or nationalized for the greater good:
- Gasoline/diesel
- All medications
- All medical treatments
Pharm companies should be non-profit. Pay their people reasonable base salaries and any money made over gets put into R&D, not bonuses or high salaries. Same for oil companies, hospitals. Too many people in the word are actually overpaid for what they actually do.
It's time to put people before profit. Want to be a doctor? Do it for love of helping others, not the overpaid income. The government could run the medical schools and the doctors could emerge debt free and work for a single-payer system making a fair wage and everyone gets fair medical treatment at no cost beyond a slight rise in taxes. Even with a high tax, the tax cost to a person is FFFFFAAAAAARRRRR less than that of bankruptcy from treatments they get jammed for under the capitalist medical system.
I don't get it, why isn't the change the only thing being patented? I don't understand how you can re-patent something. "Re-patent" is the issue.
1) Patent something
2) Patent expires
3) Make small change
4) Patent "new drug" (previous drug with small change)
5) Previous drug should no longer be patented while "new drug" is now patented. Right?
Both the previous drug and the "new drug" should exist as separate things and have different legal protection, shouldn't they?
"First, they'd have competition within months of introducing the new drugs"
If it were that easy to make, was it really worth a patent?
"but Novartis couldn't reduce prices to the same level while remaining profitable because of costs incurred during development"
So they won't produce Cold Remedy. Cold Remedy Plus. Then Cold Remedy Flu and Colds. Then Cold Remedy Extra Strong. Then...
This also presumes that only Novartis does R&D. They don't. So Novartis could take someone else's product and sell that and use it to subsidise the R&D that produces cures nobody else has cures for (and makes them a Non-Generic brand).
"They're specialists in development"
Of the "lets tweak it a bit" school.
USA english is the second most spoken version of English.
Globalization is zero-sum.
Hence it's prudent for nations to amend their constitutions/laws/rules/regulations/policies accordingly.
Casteism
I misread the title as "Indian Supreme Court denies Novaris Cancer Drug to Patient." Much better upon reading the TFS.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
They steal it out in the open. China does it quietly, and refuses to be open about it. BUT, India lets it be known that they will steal and sell it around the world. At this time, all drugs and chemicals should be stopped from nations like China and India. In both cases, they steal patents and then use the manufacturing to create new companies and lower the prices. Then they can dump on the world market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It happens with government agencies all the time. Suggest that a cut or perhaps even lack of an increase is coming, and it's OH MY GOD, TOTAL SOCIETAL COLLAPSE.
It happened with the financial crisis, and it's happening today. Suggest that the financial sector not be backed by the government and it's OH MY GOD, IT'LL COLLAPSE THE ECONOMY.
Suggest that drug companies do with a bit less profit - at least charge us what they charge abroad and it's OH MY GOD, EVERYONE'S GONNA DIE! LIKE TOMORROW.
Pretty much any suggestion to any organization that it might get less money and it's TOTAL DISASTER.
A parlor game could be suggesting to organizational leaders that some rule be changed which would result in less profit. You would win by coming up with the correct PROCLAMATION_OF_IMPENDING_DISASTER they state.
No, I never indirectly said or implied that. My wording provides the implication (my implication) that wikipedia.org is an American organization situated and hosted in the USA. That is the full reason for my use of the phrase "the USA wikipedia".
:>)
You've got to be able to recognize when haters use straw man arguments. First they put words in your mouth in an attempt to make you look foolish for saying something stupid (setting up the straw man). Then they point out how stupid what (they say which) you said really is (pushing the straw man which they had erected down). They do this while hoping that the audience does not notice that you never said what they claim you said (in other words, the straw man argument was actually made by them).
.
For an example, see "think of the children" type arguments, when any point of argument is countered with "Oh my god, you want children to be molested by pedophiles!" which uses hyperbole and putting words in your mouth to create a straw man argument.