Slashdot Mirror
Big Pharma Presses US To Quash Cheap Drug Production In India
An anonymous reader writes "Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), are leaning on the United States government to discourage India from allowing the production and sale of affordable generic drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. India is currently on the U.S. government's Priority Watch List — countries whose practices on protecting intellectual property Washington believes should be monitored closely. Last year Novartis lost a six-year legal battle after the Indian Supreme court ruled that small changes and improvements to the drug Glivec did not amount to innovation deserving of a patent. Western drugmakers Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche Holding, Sanofi, and others have a bigger share of the fast-growing drug market in India. But they have been frustrated by a series of decisions on patents and pricing, as part of New Delhi's push to increase access to life-saving treatments in a place where only 15 percent of 1.2 billion people are covered by health insurance. One would certainly understand and probably agree with the need for for cheaper drugs. But don't forget that big pharma, for all its problems still is the number one creator of new drugs. In 2012 alone, the U.S. government and private companies spent a combined $130 billion (PDF) on medical research."
I think it's terrible that the US would try to keep more people from getting access to effective, affordable remedies, such as beta blockers.
Breakfast served all day!
But of course, reams of whiny butthurt over the proposed new appearance of Slashdot trumps all real issues this week. Will you crybabies please boycott the site as you have promised and let the rest of us get back to discussing real issues? You're like those Hollywood cokebrains who promise to leave the US whenever some Republican gets elected, but who let us down every time.
that poor people die because they cannot buy the cheap drugs that may save their lives than a few rich western pharma lose any profit. :-(
Let them produce cheap drugs for local consumption. OK don't allow them to be imported to the west where (most) people can afford them. But condemning people to die just to protect your profits is, frankly, sick. Maybe not much different from tobacco companies, but still sick.
It sounds odd, or the start of a joke, but I'm serious.
She ordered some variety of medicine from an online pharmacy (which one, I don't know) and had some heavy cognitive dissonance. 'Did I just give money to scammers?' She waited slightly longer than she expected to, and had the thought that she really had been taken for a ride ... but then they arrived, and (to her surprise) were postmarked India.
"They were cheap, and worked."
She'll be displeased to hear about just how far regulatory capture can go, in this arena ...
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Big Oil, Big Automotive, Big Chance-I-Stop-Paying-Attention.
Just because you think all large companies are evil doesn't mean everyone else does.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Yup. A friend of mine needed some medications, taken on a regular basis. IIRC he had some limited insurance, but it didn't cover squat in medication. He ordered them online from a pharmacy in Canada. A legitimate outfit - had to show he had the prescriptions and whatnot. The meds were drop shipped from Switzerland and India, complete with funny foreign return addresses and stamps. He saved a bundle. There were the real McCoy too, not some brand X knockoff. Switzerland and India was where they were made.
Even better is doggy Prozac. Apparently they have Prozac for dogs - and it's the exact same stuff, from the same factory, but at a fraction of the price. This one is 2nd hand, from my neighbor the veterinarian, but she's not a BS artist. A coworker's wife had a Prozac Rx, so hubby writes an Rx for their dog, and she takes it.
The current crop (and the future crops, too) of drugs were NEVER intended to have to recoup costs out of non-developed-world countries.
In fact, pretty much ALL drug research is based solely on the American market. That is, everything else outside the American market is gravy (or, in this case, pure profit). The metrics are driven by how long it takes to recoup money from the USA's market.
The reason why is that the US drug market (due to a combination of large population, and completely unregulated pricing) is so much more lucrative than anywhere else, by an order of magnitude even more than Western Europe. That's right - the USA alone brings in more profit THAN THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD for a drug.
Letting India manufacture these domestically (and, heck, the entire rest of the developed world) wouldn't affect drug research and investment strategies one little bit. The big fear from drug companies is reimportation, where drugs manufactured in India are imported back into the USA for sale, without the major patent premium being paid. This is fairly trivially avoidable.
So, yeah, in the end, it's about squeezing that last dime in profits out of people, and not fundamentally giving a damned about anything else.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Get rid of FDA, get rid of government and basically costs drop dramatically that prices could truly be taken down
The FDA doesn't keep drug prices high, they keep people alive. Returning to the days of snake oil is not the solution.
The problem is that patents can be extended by silly little changes that have no real effect, and the world is deprived of the invention or charged unconscionable amounts of money. Glivec (Imatinib) the first of the exceptionally expensive cancer drugs, costing $92,000 a year. Yet its development costs were not that great, and production costs have fallen dramatically.(especially in India).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You don't really believe things like the "FDA" is what is driving up the price to you?
Have a little respect. Here in the US such beliefs are a religion to some people. Must be Satan (a/k/a the FDA) driving the prices up, let the Holy Market prevail! Ok, it actually is the gubmint, but the part that's responsible for enforcing monopolies for ever greater profit, not the FDA.
US Solution? Ban cheap canadian drugs from canada as they were "not tested" or such.
Yeah, same drugs from the same factory, but they're magically tainted by passing through Canada. OTOH you have some online pharmacies (legitimate outfits) that will drop ship the stuff to people in the US.
The reason is pretty clear, it is about Imaginary Property (IP). The same pixie dust that makes copyright, trademarks, and patents.
And they're bullying a poor country like "hey, all these medicines that we were not going to sell because you can't afford, you are not allowed to make them yourselves; tell your population to just die." Yeah, pretty nice.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Hundreds of billions spent on drug development, primarily driven by state investment and infrastructure, and billions of people in India and elsewhere gain significant health benefits. Really, this is the way it is supposed to work. That some private individuals are not making as large a personal profit is purely their own problem.
Someone has to pay the bill.
Glaxo spent more than $350 million over 25 years to develop [a malaria] vaccine for military personnel and travelers and expects to invest an additional $260 million to complete development. But Glaxo was reluctant to pay for pediatric trials in impoverished nations on its own, so the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided $200 million through the nonprofit PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative to drive development and testing over the finish line.
Hope for a Malaria Vaccine [Oct 1013]
I love how pointing out greed can be interpreted as communism. Gotta admire Faux News & co. brainwashing efficiency.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I don't hate to be the guy to ask you, but did you really just fall off the turnip truck? This is a story on drug patents. Slashdot runs stories on patents and greedy companies extracting money from them allllll the fucking time, and twice on Thursdays.
Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.
Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.
I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.
Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.
Actually, to legally copy a drug in India, you'd have to come up with a new process for manufacturing it. Indian IP law recognizes only manufacturing processes, not the final chemicals themselves or the purpose for which they're used.
Case in point: in America, you can take a drug like Proscar, approved in 5mg strength for treating prostate problems, and get a brand new patent for a 1mg strength used for hair growth. In India, you'd be politely told, "No" when you applied for the second patent, because as far as Indian IP law is concerned, unless you come up with a new way to manufacture the drug, you've done nothing worthy of patent protection.
The same goes for extended-release forms. If you're taking an old drug and coating bits with dissolving coating, India will yawn and say, "sorry, no new patent for you. " You'd have to come up with something groundbreaking, like OROS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... ), which makes drugs that would otherwise have intolerably-short half-lives viable.
Although Indian IP law doesn't regard ER forms as necessarily being special, India's unwillingness to allow patents on anything besides the manufacturing process actually opens the door to Indian pharmaceutical companies releasing ER forms LONG before the original patent expires, and before the American developer of the original drug comes out with its own version. If an Americana pharma company gets a patent on a drug & plans to wait until the first patent is about to expire before patenting an ER form, an Indian company who comes up with an alternate manufacturing process can blow their plan out of the water and release an improved ER form YEARS sooner.
Much of the expense, and focus, of drug research of the US is on new patents, not on new treatments.
Let me take you a visit to the world of patent history: Welcome to insulin, which was released *with a free patent* because of its discoverer's desire to help humanity, immediately. The *refinement* and processing of insulin has, fortunately for profits, been filled with many patentable processes. Business has benefited, and there have actually been useful improvements in its purity, which helps prevent allergic reactions, and its price. The original refinement from slaughterhouse fetuses, to avoid contamination by pancreatic juices, was effective but unsustainable as we diabetics survived longer and became a larger market. Refinement from pancreases from adult slaughterhouse animals filled the supply, and was very profitable for decades.
But the last round of significant patents was running out. Factories worldwide were geared up to operate, outside the control of the Eli Lilly company, and to halve the price of insulin. What to do, what to do? Wait! We can patent *human* insulin! By first modifying animal insulin with new ly patented enzyme treatments, and by eventually using genetically modified e.coli to produce it without animals, we now have "pure human" insulin, to the benefit of diabetics worldwide! It's human insulin, what could be better?
The answer is that almost all other sources of insulin better. Human insulin is faster acting, but that's pointless when you're wearing an insulin pump and the updake is much faster *anyway*. The claims about animal insulin leading to insulin resistance or allergy were due to the *impurities*, which are almost nonexistent in modern processing of animal insulins. And human insulin actually contributes to hypoglycemic unawareness which gave me one heck of a time when I couldn't get animal insulin anymore. (I tried!) Human insulin does not provide a single benefit over animal insulin to its users, and the deficits are very real. Other fast acting insulin mixtures, have been available for *decades, and long acting versions for different shot based insulin treatments. They're now all now replaced by "human" insulins that are roughly twice the price, even with inflation
So as a diabetic who's faced this sort of thing, the "Big Pharma" companies can go play "Rites of Spring" on my !@#$. They've demonstrated that they prefer profits on new and actively inferior patent-ptoected products over the health and safety of millions of medication who absolutely require this medication. I cut companies like Lilly *no* slack in legislation or in the courts or in global treaties. They've abused us for decades, and I hope their leadership rots.
...someone has to pay for drug research...
Well, that $130 Billion works out to about $415 per person in the US. Government and charaties and the like paid about half of that and "industry" paid the other half. Total healthcare spending from that same PDF was $2,939 Billion (although those numbers are a bit confusing because it seems to include the money industry spent on the research added to the amount industry was paid by patients). In any case, that's about $9390 per person in the US, or around 45 times the amount industry spent on research. So, if a few percent of total healthcare spending goes towards the pharm/biotech/medical devices industry, they're doing just fine. Also the answer to who is paying for medical research is that the taxpayers and patients are. Frankly, if you look at the math, it's pretty ridiculous. If half of the research costs aren't going to be paid by industry anyway, and it's such a small fraction of the total healthcare costs, why not just double or triple what the government is paying for research and stop giving a cent of it to for profit industries. Then, do all the research through public research institutions and relegate industry to a manufacturing role. Let them all be 'generic' manufacturers competing on production of the same drugs. In the meantime the few extra percent that would raise total healthcare expenditure by would be offset by the much larger drop in healthcare spending due to the fact that a bunch of artificial monopolies just vanished.
Now, I know it's tragic that people who didn't pay might also benefit from this research. Even worse than the people in other countries are the untold future generations of humans who will also benefit with better health and happier lives without paying for it. Bunch of filthy freeloading descendants.
I don't know if AC's get notified about reponses to their comments, but either way, this question goes out in response.
We tried making an "extra strength" version of our biggest seller, Patanol, a few years ago and lost. We had to come up with a lot of changes to get the once-a-day version approved.
The phrase "come up with" implies some measure of deliberate but spurious inventiveness, as if you made the changes exclusively to get a new patent, rather than to improve the drug itself. While the grandparent's post mentioned adding pink dye, and that surely is a trival change, if you are "coming up" with changes, it sound like your are fixing something that isn't broken, and the only reason your tinkering beyond adding a dye is precisely because that is not enough to get a patent. In other words, you are ding precisely enough to get more money (as a company), rather than making the best possible drug.
So, genuine questions here:
Why do you think such behaviour should be rewarded?
Why should limited tinkering that was done to change the drug without the eventual aim of improvement extend a patent?