To see all the underlying data, go to DTP Human Tumor Cell Line Screen data page on the National Cancer Institute's Developmental Therapeutics Program web site. There's a lot more data listed here.
These researchers are funded by public money. Their results need to be used for the public benefit, and shared publicly.
The law that changed this was the Bayh-Dole Act. It was controversial when it was passed and there are still people who argue against it. You need to need to realize, though, that a simple philosopical argument like the above has no chance of changing things. The reason is mainly that the most easily quantified measures of development (things like number of patents and number of patents licensed) increased dramatically after Bayh-Dole. The politicians love it because they can point to hard numbers that show the impact. The universities love it because now they can get revenue (and sometimes BIG bucks) out of "basic research". In 2002 the Economist credited the Act with keeping the US economy healthy and called it possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century. It is certainly true that good arguments can be made that there are costs and that the numbers that are trotted out don't tell the whole story. Even the Economist has published a more cautious piece. But the fact remains that arguing against Bayh-Dole is a very uphill battle.
It's not the scientists, drug companies, or lack of collaboration that's the problem - it's the FDA. They are far too restrictive about what is approved, and approval takes much longer than it should. An expedient and more reasonable policy of approving drugs (if approval should be necessary at all) would save a LOT of lives.
So are you saying that if the FDA was less restrictive that the Vioxx mess would never have happened? Do you think Merck would have done MORE testing if there was no FDA and killed the drug on their own or do you think Merck would have done less testing and the lawyers would have said "Oh, that's OK you didn't know" and not filed any suits? I think liability issues are always going to be much more inhibiting to companies than the FDA.
COME ON! The guys working on this are not starving artists. They are well-educated people with well-paying jobs.
And how can they continue to be well paid if the companies that employ them lose money? Keep in mind that for every drug that gets approved, 15-20 fail in expensive clinical trials and many more before they even get to clinical trial. If a company can't make enough on their successes to pay for all the failures, they will go out of business.
If you think academics do most of the drug discovery today, you have a very different definition of drug discovery than most people I know. Academic work is mostly like this report; interesting, sometimes even innovative ideas tested in in vitro assays. But finding compounds with interesting in vitro activity is less than 1% of the effort of discovering a drug (ie, a compound that is FDA approved for sale). The big problem in drug discovery is finding effective, efficient ways to pick which of the the many, many compounds with interesting in vitro activities actually can be a useful drug. I've run into many academic researchers that are pretty clueless about this problem and none that have made substantial progress in attacking the problem.
That may be what you want, but it is not the law (at least in the US). Any IP generated under a US grant or contract is the property of the grantee or contractor. Google for the Bayh-Dole Act.
You obviously have no experience with university tech transfer offices. They are ten times more greedy than the companies. Although some amount of reality has been creeping into the system, universities (at least in the US) are notorious for thinking that their dicoveries are worth tons of money. Oh and you are also clueless if you think that university research delivers ready to go drugs to pharm companies. University research is vital for the the overall effort, but in terms of getting a drug on the market, most of the time it gets you 1-2% of the way there. Just like the stories here. They are no more than 1-2% of the way to being a useful drug and to claim that whoever invests 99% of the resources should get nothing doesn't sound reasonable.
So, that's 10 SNPs to patent - except most of them were published papers comming out of acedemia, so they can't be patented.
What makes you think things coming out of academia can't be patented? In the US at least, the academic tech transfer offices are more aggressive (and tend to be more unreasonable ) than most companies.
Thanks for the explanation. I figured it had to be something like that. It can be a pain, however, if you are the government employee and you want to jump in and code. In our case ~2/3 of the code is written by government employees and so we just get the contractors to waive and call the whole thing public domain.
Sorry to disappoint you but the Bayh-Dole Act makes the grantee the owner of any patent that comes from work under a federal grant. Being funded by public money (specifically US federal money) by law does NOT mean all data and inventions from that research are in the public domain.
That's not precisely true according what I read in the US Code. Work done by federal employees certainly can not be copyrighted, but work done by others can be assigned to the federal government. Of course the specifics of who did this work and whether it qualifies as a work of the government (ie how DID they get around this) are something I would like to see clearly explained
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
I was wondering myself how they could claim copyright. It is completely clear that works of the US Government can not be copyrighted, so the only thing I can think of is that the people who wrote this were contractors and they assigned the copyright to the government.
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 1
It depends on which government you are talking about, but work done by US federal government employees can NOT be copyrighted. It is all public domain. Work done by contractors, by default is owned by the contractors, although the government can encourage making it open source. I'm not sure how for the government can go. I don't know whether copyright is covered under the Bayh-Dole Act. Patents are definitely covered by Bayh-Dole which means that any patent that comes out of the grant or contract is owned by the grantee or contractor and the government retains only very limited rights. The government can ask for an exception to the Bayh-Dole when putting together a grant or contract solicitation, but it is a big pain and most of such requests are turned down.
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source?
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Read up on the Bayh-Dole Act. In the US at least, inventions created using government funds (either grants or contracts) by default are owned and administered by the grantee or contractor, not the government. I laugh when people talk about the drug companies "stealing" government funded university research because the universities are the most agressive people out there patenting research and trying to hit drug companies up for big bucks to license the patents. Work done by actual government employees can certainly be patented, but obviously in that case the patent is owned by the government. Work done by government employees can NOT be copyrighted, which can lead to problems when trying to get government involved in GPL'd projects. NASA has a lot of contractors that that are still looked on as "NASA", so I don't know whether these guys are government or contractors.
If you are implying that there is little or no funding of telomerase research in the US, you are very wrong. A quick search of CRISP shows almost 900 grants in the last 5 years with telomerase in the title. A number of efforts to inhibit telomerase are either starting or just about to start clinical trials. The work described here, although interesting and potentially valuable, is no where near clinical trial and hence it is more than a little bit premature to consider it a major breakthough.
It sounds like you are assuming their press release is telling the whole story. If you think this is the first group to demonstrate in vitro inhibition of tumor cell growth via telomerase inhibition, you are very mistaken. See
PubMed
Not only are there many other efforts to inhibit telomerase, but a number of these other efforts have produced compounds that will enter clinical trials soon. This approach is a very long way from clinical trials.
Only in exceptional circumstances. Ownership of IP generated using US federal grant or contract dollars is governed by the Bayh-Dole Act (and a few related modifications). By default, the US government does NOT own the IP and can not demand that the IP be assigned to the government or put in the public domain. You may be confused by the latest announcement of NIH that will create a place for grantees to make published papers available to the public within a year of publication. Note that this submission is only requested, it is not required. Note also that it has absolutely nothing to do with the grantee giving up any patent or copyright rights.
Well there's John Cramer who has just published an alternate theory explaining the RHIC resluts and has also published a couple of novels based on experimental high energy physics.
The lesson to learn here: if small problems exist, dig at them to see how far you can get and then fix *all* of the problems that you uncover.
Which is exactly what happened. The problem wasn't which instrument went in which rover, it was which calibration to use with which set of data. The instruments are close enough to identical that looking at the results broadly doesn't suggest anything is wrong. The people who look at the nitty gritty details of these data, however, noticed some subtle things that didn't quite look right and dug and dug until they figured out what the problem was.`
Manufacturing, yes, but definitely not R&D, since this is often done in universities using results of public-funded research. And US drugs companies spent 10 times more in marketing than for R&D.
Both statements are unfounded. First, work done at universities in much more to the R side of R&D rather than the D side, there is relatively little overlap. Second even if the universities do come up with something useful, US law gives them the right to hold the patent and they don't just give the patent away to the drug companies, they try to get as much as they can for it. Finally, as a number of other posters have pointed out, publically available records can easily show that most drug companies spend nowhere near 10 times as much on marketing as R&D.
Pharmaceuticals: only a fractionabout 15%-20% of the extra cost paid by consumers goes back into R & D - i.e. it works but is a very inefficient incentive system.
That metric doesn't make sense to me. Do you think a very small pharmaceutical industry that only works on a few "easy" diseases, but puts 50% back into R&D is clearly better? I think a better metric is the total R&D spending with patents vs. without. Of course any estimate of this now is just a guess because we do have patents, but I really can't see how anyone would invest without some kind of exclusivity period. By far and away the major expense of finding a drug is figuring out which one works and proving it. Who would ever invest the money to do this if the results became available for all to use?
Th patent system works so well that huge government intervention and expenditure is needed to keep R & D spend going. The best examples are again with pharmaceuticals. In the US the FDA gives pharma companies extra incetives like those of orphan drugs, in the UK they get tax breaks.
Those subsidies are due to the realization that drugs are very expensive to bring to market, so expensive that there are diseases which affect too few people to ever make finding a treatment economically viable. I can't see how eliminating patents would do anything except increase the number of diseases that are "orphaned".
Globally a huge amount of R & D is carried out or funded by univerisites and Wellcome Trust
Actually this work is fairly orthogonal to what the drug companies do, with the universities tending much more toward the R and the companies much more toward the D. Although it is beginning to change somewhat, there has been quite a reluctance in the academic community to acknowledge importance of D like activities. If you don't believe me, submit a grant that proposes medium scale synthesis, pharmacology, toxicology, or other vital components of develoment and see how the study sections trash it.
As someone who works as a visiting scientist in the genomics lab at the Broad Institute (think: MIT) and at harvard labs (my primary job), I can tell you something: Basic research is doing much of the research that provides first round targets for drugs.
And that first round target is about 1% of the expense of getting a new drug to market.
Slashdot Mirror
To see all the underlying data, go to DTP Human Tumor Cell Line Screen data page on the National Cancer Institute's Developmental Therapeutics Program web site. There's a lot more data listed here.
The law that changed this was the Bayh-Dole Act. It was controversial when it was passed and there are still people who argue against it. You need to need to realize, though, that a simple philosopical argument like the above has no chance of changing things. The reason is mainly that the most easily quantified measures of development (things like number of patents and number of patents licensed) increased dramatically after Bayh-Dole. The politicians love it because they can point to hard numbers that show the impact. The universities love it because now they can get revenue (and sometimes BIG bucks) out of "basic research". In 2002 the Economist credited the Act with keeping the US economy healthy and called it possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century. It is certainly true that good arguments can be made that there are costs and that the numbers that are trotted out don't tell the whole story. Even the Economist has published a more cautious piece. But the fact remains that arguing against Bayh-Dole is a very uphill battle.
So are you saying that if the FDA was less restrictive that the Vioxx mess would never have happened? Do you think Merck would have done MORE testing if there was no FDA and killed the drug on their own or do you think Merck would have done less testing and the lawyers would have said "Oh, that's OK you didn't know" and not filed any suits? I think liability issues are always going to be much more inhibiting to companies than the FDA.
And how can they continue to be well paid if the companies that employ them lose money? Keep in mind that for every drug that gets approved, 15-20 fail in expensive clinical trials and many more before they even get to clinical trial. If a company can't make enough on their successes to pay for all the failures, they will go out of business.
If you think academics do most of the drug discovery today, you have a very different definition of drug discovery than most people I know. Academic work is mostly like this report; interesting, sometimes even innovative ideas tested in in vitro assays. But finding compounds with interesting in vitro activity is less than 1% of the effort of discovering a drug (ie, a compound that is FDA approved for sale). The big problem in drug discovery is finding effective, efficient ways to pick which of the the many, many compounds with interesting in vitro activities actually can be a useful drug. I've run into many academic researchers that are pretty clueless about this problem and none that have made substantial progress in attacking the problem.
If the public market is capable of such striking technological advances why to I have to sit in a plane for 7-8 hours to fly from the US to Europe?
That may be what you want, but it is not the law (at least in the US). Any IP generated under a US grant or contract is the property of the grantee or contractor. Google for the Bayh-Dole Act.
You obviously have no experience with university tech transfer offices. They are ten times more greedy than the companies. Although some amount of reality has been creeping into the system, universities (at least in the US) are notorious for thinking that their dicoveries are worth tons of money. Oh and you are also clueless if you think that university research delivers ready to go drugs to pharm companies. University research is vital for the the overall effort, but in terms of getting a drug on the market, most of the time it gets you 1-2% of the way there. Just like the stories here. They are no more than 1-2% of the way to being a useful drug and to claim that whoever invests 99% of the resources should get nothing doesn't sound reasonable.
Thanks for the explanation. I figured it had to be something like that. It can be a pain, however, if you are the government employee and you want to jump in and code. In our case ~2/3 of the code is written by government employees and so we just get the contractors to waive and call the whole thing public domain.
Sorry to disappoint you but the Bayh-Dole Act makes the grantee the owner of any patent that comes from work under a federal grant. Being funded by public money (specifically US federal money) by law does NOT mean all data and inventions from that research are in the public domain.
That's not precisely true according what I read in the US Code. Work done by federal employees certainly can not be copyrighted, but work done by others can be assigned to the federal government. Of course the specifics of who did this work and whether it qualifies as a work of the government (ie how DID they get around this) are something I would like to see clearly explained
I was wondering myself how they could claim copyright. It is completely clear that works of the US Government can not be copyrighted, so the only thing I can think of is that the people who wrote this were contractors and they assigned the copyright to the government.
It depends on which government you are talking about, but work done by US federal government employees can NOT be copyrighted. It is all public domain. Work done by contractors, by default is owned by the contractors, although the government can encourage making it open source. I'm not sure how for the government can go. I don't know whether copyright is covered under the Bayh-Dole Act. Patents are definitely covered by Bayh-Dole which means that any patent that comes out of the grant or contract is owned by the grantee or contractor and the government retains only very limited rights. The government can ask for an exception to the Bayh-Dole when putting together a grant or contract solicitation, but it is a big pain and most of such requests are turned down.
Read up on the Bayh-Dole Act. In the US at least, inventions created using government funds (either grants or contracts) by default are owned and administered by the grantee or contractor, not the government. I laugh when people talk about the drug companies "stealing" government funded university research because the universities are the most agressive people out there patenting research and trying to hit drug companies up for big bucks to license the patents. Work done by actual government employees can certainly be patented, but obviously in that case the patent is owned by the government. Work done by government employees can NOT be copyrighted, which can lead to problems when trying to get government involved in GPL'd projects. NASA has a lot of contractors that that are still looked on as "NASA", so I don't know whether these guys are government or contractors.
These guys are far too late to the party the get all the patents. Seems like most people complain about Geron having too much patent power.
If you are implying that there is little or no funding of telomerase research in the US, you are very wrong. A quick search of CRISP shows almost 900 grants in the last 5 years with telomerase in the title. A number of efforts to inhibit telomerase are either starting or just about to start clinical trials. The work described here, although interesting and potentially valuable, is no where near clinical trial and hence it is more than a little bit premature to consider it a major breakthough.
It sounds like you are assuming their press release is telling the whole story. If you think this is the first group to demonstrate in vitro inhibition of tumor cell growth via telomerase inhibition, you are very mistaken. See PubMed Not only are there many other efforts to inhibit telomerase, but a number of these other efforts have produced compounds that will enter clinical trials soon. This approach is a very long way from clinical trials.
Only in exceptional circumstances. Ownership of IP generated using US federal grant or contract dollars is governed by the Bayh-Dole Act (and a few related modifications). By default, the US government does NOT own the IP and can not demand that the IP be assigned to the government or put in the public domain. You may be confused by the latest announcement of NIH that will create a place for grantees to make published papers available to the public within a year of publication. Note that this submission is only requested, it is not required. Note also that it has absolutely nothing to do with the grantee giving up any patent or copyright rights.
Well there's John Cramer who has just published an alternate theory explaining the RHIC resluts and has also published a couple of novels based on experimental high energy physics.
Which is exactly what happened. The problem wasn't which instrument went in which rover, it was which calibration to use with which set of data. The instruments are close enough to identical that looking at the results broadly doesn't suggest anything is wrong. The people who look at the nitty gritty details of these data, however, noticed some subtle things that didn't quite look right and dug and dug until they figured out what the problem was.`
Both statements are unfounded. First, work done at universities in much more to the R side of R&D rather than the D side, there is relatively little overlap. Second even if the universities do come up with something useful, US law gives them the right to hold the patent and they don't just give the patent away to the drug companies, they try to get as much as they can for it. Finally, as a number of other posters have pointed out, publically available records can easily show that most drug companies spend nowhere near 10 times as much on marketing as R&D.
That metric doesn't make sense to me. Do you think a very small pharmaceutical industry that only works on a few "easy" diseases, but puts 50% back into R&D is clearly better? I think a better metric is the total R&D spending with patents vs. without. Of course any estimate of this now is just a guess because we do have patents, but I really can't see how anyone would invest without some kind of exclusivity period. By far and away the major expense of finding a drug is figuring out which one works and proving it. Who would ever invest the money to do this if the results became available for all to use?
Th patent system works so well that huge government intervention and expenditure is needed to keep R & D spend going. The best examples are again with pharmaceuticals. In the US the FDA gives pharma companies extra incetives like those of orphan drugs, in the UK they get tax breaks.
Those subsidies are due to the realization that drugs are very expensive to bring to market, so expensive that there are diseases which affect too few people to ever make finding a treatment economically viable. I can't see how eliminating patents would do anything except increase the number of diseases that are "orphaned".
Globally a huge amount of R & D is carried out or funded by univerisites and Wellcome Trust
Actually this work is fairly orthogonal to what the drug companies do, with the universities tending much more toward the R and the companies much more toward the D. Although it is beginning to change somewhat, there has been quite a reluctance in the academic community to acknowledge importance of D like activities. If you don't believe me, submit a grant that proposes medium scale synthesis, pharmacology, toxicology, or other vital components of develoment and see how the study sections trash it.
Scott Adams never worked for the government and government workers are hardly the only ones that recognize the inane management depicted in Dilbert.