AIDS Drug Patent Revoked In US 357
eldavojohn writes "Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art. This is potentially good news for India & Brazil who need this drug to be cheap; if the US action leads to the patent being rejected in these countries, competition could drastically lower prices. But the ruling bad news for Gilead Sciences. The company has vowed to appeal. We discussed this drug before."
Cool... (Score:5, Insightful)
The chemical and pharmaceutical industry happily grew to become one of the biggest contributors to developed nations GDP using only this kind of protection. It does not really need anything more. Anything more is just protectionism and racketeering.
Remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that I'm against making life saving drugs available to anyone who needs them, but if that's what you want to do then everybody should bear the cost (through taxes), not just shareholders of pharmaceutical companies.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree that it feels wrong that there are people dying because they can't afford the drugs, but the fact is that the drugs wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the extortionate prices - it wouldn't be worth the drug companies' time.
I just want to know (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem in the US is that the government doesn't want to impose a price for drugs that everyone in the country can afford. And so, because the pharmaceuticals aren't put on a leash, they charge as much as they can, which maximizes profit instead of maximizing numbers of patients who can benefit.
When two people can afford $10 and $100 respectively, the price is $100, which maximizes profit, instead of $10, which maximizes the number of people being helped.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:1, Insightful)
Your taxes do pay for the research (Score:5, Insightful)
From Physicians for a National Health Program's website: "15. Taxpayers pay for most research costs, and many clinical trials as well. In 2000, for example, industry spent 18% of its $13 billion for R&D on basic research, or $2.3 billion in gross costs (National Science Foundation 2003). All of that money was subsidized by taxpayers through deductions and tax credits. Taxpayers also paid for all $18 billion in NIH funds, as well as for R&D funds in the Department of Defense and other public budgets. Most of that money went for basic research to discover breakthrough drugs, and public money also supports more than 5000 clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002). Taxpayer contributions are similar in more recent years, only larger." http://www.pnhp.org/news/2004/february/will_lower_drug_pric.php [pnhp.org]
So they paid 2.3 billion (tax subsidized), and we kicked in 18 billion. Then they get to charge us for access to the drugs for which we paid 95% of the basic research costs.
Though you may say that PNHP is a bunch of hippies, so if you prefer a more grandfatherly source the AARP do a decent job too: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/prescription/double_taxation.html [aarp.org]
Of course that is the reason that while you may not trust the government, they could be a much better steward of medical research than market forces. Market based R&D is inherently morally corrupt. It can't be otherwise. If its not obvious because of the fact that more R&D is spent developing drugs to give octogenarians a hard-on and a full head of hair than to offer effective treatment for malaria that kills millions each year in the developing world, MSF gives a great summary of the reasons that market based R&D is wrong: http://www.accessmed-msf.org/main/medical-innovation/introduction-to-medical-innovation/what-is-wrong-with-r-d-today/ [accessmed-msf.org]
Though I do agree with you that at present I don't trust the government. Not that they do bad research... the NIH and the researchers they fund are amazing. But I don't trust the corrupt system that gives the breakthrough drugs that the government develops into the hands of private industry so that they can extort millions of Americans for the price that the 'market will bear' for drugs they may need to survive.
Re:Remind me again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's damned expensive and takes a long time to prove to the FDA and society-leeching lawyers that a product is (relatively) safe.
Besides, most (all?) of the low-hanging fruit have been picked. It takes a lot of effort to climb to the top of the tree and hunt for edible fruit.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
Being commercial businesses that need to make profit for their shareholders, it is far more profitable to sell someone a cocktail of drugs that only alleviate some of the symptoms, such that the patient has to keep using them indefinitely, rather than providing a cure...
A cured patient will buy the cure once, and then not need any more drugs...
A patient still suffering will continue to buy the drugs that temporarily alleviate some of his symptoms for the rest of his life.
If one of these companies discovered a cure to AIDS, they would keep it to themselves. If they released it they would make a lot of short term profit, that is until AIDS was completely eradicated, at which point they would no longer be able to make any profit from AIDS sufferers.
It's also in their interests to make drugs with side effects, so that they can sell additional drugs to combat the side effects.
Commercial pharmaceutical research is completely corrupt by it's very nature, the goals of a commercial business are completely at odds with the patient's needs.
Pharmaceutical research should be performed by government and charities, with full accountability and no commercial bias. It is in the interest of government to have a healthy populace, as unhealthy citizens don't earn any money for the country... Even more so in a country with nationalised healthcare, as unhealthy citizens are an additional burden. If a national healthcare system could put AIDS sufferers on a short course of drugs so they could continue to live a healthy life after a month or two of treatment, instead of feeding them expensive drugs for 30-40 years until they die, the healthcare system would benefit greatly.
Pharmaceutical companies should be relegated to lowest-bidder manufacturing of publicly available drugs.
I can feel the side-effects. (Score:1, Insightful)
"Relative" as long as it's not you. [wikipedia.org]
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cool... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, no. A sensible person might believe this, but since the beginning of the nineties it has been common practice to patent the discovery of genes. As in "I have identified a gene that (allegedly) determines who will be fat and I am patenting it". Things such as this so-called "fat gene" are naturally occurring but nevertheless companies are falling over themselves to patent (the discovery of) their existence. This is happening now, there is no invention at all, just a discovery of a naturally occurring substance.
Do a google search for "gene patents" or read Michael Crichtons "Next" novel for more details.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:2, Insightful)
It is more profitable to provide a drug that temporarily alleviates the symptoms, than one that cures the problem. Look at the HIV/AIDS medications, sufferers are expected to take a cocktail of drugs which will suppress the virus and delay the onset of full blown AIDS from HIV... But it won't cure the problem, the sufferer will take these drugs for many years but will still eventually develop full blown AIDS and die an excruciating death. They are also still able to infect others, and thus unlikely to have a fulfilling sex life or to have kids.
The years that the HIV/AIDS sufferer continues taking these drugs, means continuous profit for the drugs companies selling them, which is good for business.
However a vaccine that cured HIV, and allowed the sufferer to continue their life as normal would be a one-shot treatment, and would eliminate the risk of the sufferer infecting others.
Medical research should _NOT_ be conducted by for-profit companies, it is in their interest to keep as many patients suffering for as long as possible so as to generate more profit. Research into medicine should be done by government and charity, and released into the public domain for the greater good. You could also tax for-profit medical providers, insurers etc, to provide money for research.
Companies providing medical insurance would still be better off, as drugs would be cheaper and the drugs would be developed with the aim of curing the patient rather than keeping them suffering. Same for non-profit or nationalised healthcare, who would save a lot of money not only in the price of drugs, but by the reduced volume of patients.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
- Uncle Sam is scared of Big Business. (More properly, the weasels that make up Uncle Sam are scared of losing Big Business' money)
- AIDS is overblown. WHO reported ~17k AIDS deaths in the US for 2005. US Census reported ~300mill Americans, making it a pretty low priority illness, even though it's nasty and fatal. ~0.006% of the population is statistically insignificant, sad to say.
- Most AIDS victims get themselves infected through willing sexual contact. While that shouldn't matter for getting help to people, the fact is that it's more difficult to muster sympathy for illnesses that people inflict upon themselves.
Sad thing about the federal government stepping in to deal with it is that there just aren't enough people dying to get those on the Hill to take any real action. The mandate from the people isn't there, they don't want to touch Big Business, for fear of fucking up the economy and dozens of other reasons that should pale in comparison to people dying. It's not fair and it sucks, but that's life.Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:4, Insightful)
And to answer your question, there were ~46k new diagnosed AIDS cases and ~38k new diagnosed HIV cases in 2005. High mortality rate, but the percent of infected are still low enough to prevent the average person from knowing many, if any of them, making it "someone else's problem" in their minds. The old adage "out of sight, out of mind" is still true.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, more gross profit than the bankers?
Either the pharmaceutical companies are all run by geniuses, or there's a serious imbalance that should be corrected by the government - I'd be inclined to levy a windfall tax just to see the bastards squirm.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Remind me again... (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're a conspiracy nut.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:2, Insightful)
I for one am happy that they do that (although they do come up with quite a few completely new drugs as well). Do you want only ONE drug in any particular class?
In theory every antibiotic since penicillian is a me-too drug - why do we need more than one? Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor - who needs anything after the first?
However, the "me-too" drugs have several important benefits. They create competition which keeps down cost. They provide multiple treatment options for doctors. Patients don't uniformly respond to drugs in accordance with what the statistics say - while a particular drug might work better for most patients, perhaps it doesn't work so well for a few in particular. It is good to give doctors options. And then let's consider allergies - some people have them to particular drugs in a class, and options mean they can still be treated instead of going back to the dark ages.
I for one am tired of hearing complaints over "me-too" drugs. If they're so useless don't take them - just take the first one that came out. Then the "me too" drug won't cost you a dime - patented or not. And yet you'll still benefit from price competition.
What exactly is it about "me too" drugs that bothers people so much? Do you complain when you go to the shoe outlet that there is more than one model of sneaker available to purchase? Think of all the money that could have gone into bicycle research if those companies hadn't spent all that money desigining more than one pair of shoes - as if what the consumer wants to buy mattered!
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have trouble seeing that, then I doubt anyone can successfully explain it to you.
Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
Go ahead, take away their patents or institute price controls, and watch the money dry up. That will help everyone...not! You can't force investors to invest, no matter how much compulsion or Robin Hood economics you want to institute.
I just wish someone would make a list of the top 50 drugs in the last 50 years and who made them and how they were financed. I'm guessing it wasn't from a communist country.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
This way the government -- aka, the people -- own the rights to the drug. The pharmacy companies still make money, and everyone can be happy.
One thing, though... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you can't tell me that all those people who are now surviving the various types of cancer that would have died just 20 years ago is proof that people are being denied healthcare and drugs. People that would have died 20 years ago are now living full, happy lives. Well, not happy, that that's another story about how people were lied to 50 years ago about having flying cars now. On second thought, where are the flying cars...
But I digress. Seriously, for all of Big Pharma's flaws, they do help people. Medicines do cost a ton of money to research, develop, test, retest, go through FDA testing, test one more time for good measure, and finally release. Plus, after releasing the drug, more testing is done through the doctors prescribing it, as well as the company having to spend money to get the word out. Yes, advertising. It is part of it. The best wonder drug in the world won't work if nobody knows about it.
Plus, part of those high costs are for all the research on drugs that didn't work. Just because a drug is researched and millions spent on it doesn't mean it will ever get to market. One hiccup along the way can be enough to send the companies back to the drawing board. On the topic of this, costs are also raised when the company has to basically protect itself financially from when a drug reacts poorly with someone, they die, and the company is sued. Sure, it may have worked on 99,999 other people, but one wrongful death lawsuit can set a company back millions of dollars.
Last, but not least, when a drug doesn't work, it is not a complete loss. The company then knows what won't work. They can still salvage research from the drug, how it affected the virus/bacteria, and move on from there. Storage of these maybe-medicines can't be cheap, what with regulating everything from temperature and humidity to making sure that the computer backups of the backups are always up and running, because if these people lose files, it isn't just the courts they have to worry about, it is also the fact that people can die from lack of information. So their systems have to be top notch at all times. That isn't cheap.
Oh, and one last thing. As much as everyone demonizes Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does do a lot to help people. Just because his business practices weren't always on the up and up doesn't mean he's a total loss in the way of morality.
I know that I just lost half the support of Slashdot when I wrote that last comment. Oh well. Can't win them all.
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the USPS does a fantastic job. How far can you send something for $0.41 via UPS or FedEx? With USPS I can send a letter all the way to Alaska or Hawaii for the change under my couch cushions. If you compare time & cost for a 1 pound package shipped domestically, USPS comes out ahead there too.
I'm not saying the government does eveything well, but the Postal Service is one place where it excels. Many years ago, the USPS received taxpayer subsidies; but today the USPS is funded entirely by revenues from postage. If medical insurance or drug research was run half as efficiently as the USPS, we'd all be better off.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
It is evil because the big pharma corporations call themselves "ethical companies" to distinguish themselves from generic pharmaceutical companies, who are presumably "unethical" by bringing low cost generic drugs onto the market, to give people affordable alternatives. If they proclaim themselves to be "ethical" the should behave ethically and try to produce drugs that are urgently needed. Instead of searching for the next big lifestyle drug that reduces your long term chance of getting a disease by a few percent they should be developing drugs like new antibiotics where because of the spread of disease resistance there is the need for new defences. However since antibiotics are delivered for a course of treatment lasting a few weeks rather than for a lifetime with the "lifestyle" drugs they are less profitable.
As for "what others want instead of what you consider best for society", consider this - these companies receive special privileges from society that give them guaranteed monopolies for decades, called patents. In return society has a right to expect them to use those privileges ethically.
Good for US (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also good news for the US which needs this drug to be cheap. AIDS patients aren't earning a lot of money while on this therapy, and their other medical care costs a lot of money. Either them directly, or their insurance corps which mark up the payout and charge the rest of us who haven't (yet) needed the drugs.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:2, Insightful)
While we're at it, we should limit the amount of technical hardware that they can purchase. We should also limit the amount of software [perhaps 1 terabyte or 1000 software packages, whichever is least; each bash script or JavaScript file counts as 1 package]. We should also limit the amount of computer experts. We should limit the amount of paper that they use. We should limit the amount of seats that they use, in case productivity increases. We should limit the amount of desks too. We should limit the amount of toilet flushes, as well.
I can honestly agree with what you said about prescriptions and kickbacks, but I can't understand what you would want to limit anything else. Limits rarely bring more products to market at a cheaper price. I can't think of any situation like that, off the top of my head.
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you not considered the possibility that the fact that the prices in Canada are lower is because they have socialized medicine? I am quite sure you'll find the same phenomenon in other countries with similar medicine systems. Yet, against the available experimental data, you insist with the purely idiological `any form of socialized medicine is undesirable'.
You seriously think that pharmaceutical companies operate at a loss in places like Canada?
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks to the lobbying of the drug companies, it's illegal for the US government to negotiate lower prices for Medicare drugs. So yes, I'm pretty sure the US citizens are being gouged.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree about speeding up the process in some respects, but we're deathly afraid of more Vioxx type disasters. And Vioxx is only the latest of drugs withdrawn - remember thalidomide and birth defects?
We need to find a balance, maybe not where we are, but there has to be a balance.
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Drug company A develops drug X.
Drug X cost $1 Billion to develop and gain FDA* approval. It also, in massive quantities, costs $10/dose to manufacture and distribute for the typical treatment course.
Now, if we sell X for $100/treatment, we'll have to sell ~12 million courses in order to start making money.
However Canada, having socialized medicine, acts a lot like Walmart. It knows that it costs $10/dose to make, so they offer $12/course.
As a business, I have to look at providing a million courses at a profit of $2 a course, or not making any money from canada. Yet I'm NOT going to make back my research costs off of what Canada is willing to pay.
So I charge $100/course in the USA to make back my profit, meaning that any drug company looking to make drugs isn't going to count much on the potential profit of selling drugs in socialized places like Canada & Europe. They'll look at the USA.
So the USA ends up paying for the research and profit in order to get drugs developed commercially, in the form of higher drug costs.
If the USA did NOT do this, say by going the same way as Canada and Europe, we'd see substantially lower drug development because the profit is gone.
*While other countries generally have their own equivalent, the FDA seems to be the gold standard, IE once it has FDA approval, gaining approval in other countries is trivial.
Re:Your taxes do pay for the research (Score:3, Insightful)
But let me give you a little piece of free advice. If you go in to see a physician (or any person-person interaction) without that chip on your shoulder the size of Wisconsin, you might get a better response. There are great people and consummate dicks in every profession - medicine, computer science, police, teaching, etc. However, if you make the assumption that every person in a given field fits your preconceived notions (as you apparently do about medicine) that's going to be apparent to anyone with half an ear or eye open. With a cop, you'll often get a ticket. With a doctor, you will often get defensive medicine without the human component that is critical (IMO) to practicing decent medicine.
I don't know what bad experience you had with health care, and I honestly am sorry you had one or more. I believe that everyone deserves high quality, compassionate, and culturally competent health care. I insist in my own practice that I have ten minute longer appointments (30 instead of the standard 20) because I want to make sure that people have the time to get their questions answered. And most of my sick patients have my personal cell phone and email address. I think that the fact that a third of non-elderly adults in the US are uninsured for part or all of every year is a moral disaster of moonumental proportions.