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"Doctors Without Borders is reporting that four patents for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, a key AIDS/HIV drug, have been revoked on grounds of prior art.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."
Re:Remind me again... (Score:2, Interesting)
For those who are stuck to comprehend an alternative way consider the ancient Chinese model where you pay the doctor when you are well. If you get
sick you stop paying, thus the doctor has a motive to keep you in good health.
In a modern context this is a centrally organised helath service. Unfortunately most US Americans are unable to separate this idea from "socialism" (one presumes they hate society).
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet, if some company hold so called "intellectual property", say for a HIV-drug, and millions of people in your country are HIV positive and will DIE if not given the drug, then there is NO similar set of laws that allow the government to forcibly buy the rights to manufacture the drug ?
Notice that with eminent domain the government still has to PAY for the property. But you are forced to sell, even if you would prefer not to, is my point.
I think it would be very sensible to have a similar system for patents: let the government buy them out if they are sufficiently important for society. By all means, make the price such that the company comes out ahead, significantly more than it cost to develop the patent in questions.
It's very strange, I think, that "We want to build a road here" is reason enough to overrule real property while "25% of our population will die if they don't get this treatment" is not reason enough to overrule so-called "intellectual" property.
Time To Socialize It (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not to say that private industry has no place in health care. I just believe the government should be at the fore front in terms of research and patient care.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet another Pharma Myth you've bought (Score:5, Interesting)
The $800 million figure is based on the small unrepresentative subsample of all new drugs. It excludes the majority of "new" drugs that are extensions or new administrations of existing drugs, as well as all drugs developed by NIH, universities, foundations, foreign teams, or others that have been licensed in or bought. Variations on existing drugs probably cost much less because so much of the work has already been done and trials are simpler.
About half of the $800 million figure consists of "opportunity costs", the money that would have been made if the R&D funds had been invested in equities, in effect a presumed profit built in and compounded every year and then called a "cost." Drug companies then expect to make a profit on this compounded profit, as well as on their actual costs. Minus the built-in profits, R&D costs would average about $108 million 93% of the time and $400 million 7% of the time.
The $800 million estimate also does not include taxpayers' subsidies via deductions and credits and untaxed profits (DiMasi, Hansen, and Grabowski 2003; DiMasi, Hansen, Grabowski et al. 1991). Net R&D costs are then still lower.
Contrary to some press reports from the industry, screening for new compounds is becoming faster and more efficient and the time from initial testing to approval has shortened substantially (Kaitin and Healy 2000). The large size of trials seems more due to signing up specialists to lock in substantial market share. Advertising firms are now running clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002; Peterson 2002; Moyers 2002).
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:4, Interesting)
Its a different problem if the government wants the drugs but doesn't like paying the market price. I guess then it can seize the drugs anyway, problem solved. Just remember that if you start a business some day and make a product that the government likes, it might decide to seize it from you as well.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I know you can't start a drug company but that's beside the point. Somebody would.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Interesting)
Most drugs are stumbled upon by hitting some relatively similar molecule in a vast database of molecules the company has laying around from various sources.
If they don't stumble on it, they can't even begin. Then, if they do, they have to modify it to get it to work better than the simple one they stumbled upon. These modifications are mainly guesswork based on all of the possible modifications their chemists can think to try within certain limits. Then, if it does bind really well, it has to bind in the presence of everything else it would normally have to go through: other cellular components, plasma components, whole blood, liver enzymes, the works. If it sticks to any of those things or gets destroyed by the body's machinery before it can reach a concentration necessary to do whatever you want it to do from when you saw it work in the test tube...then you go back to square one or maybe two.
Then, if all of that is working, you can try some animals. If they don't die, you can try some humans. If they don't die, you can try to prove your case to the FDA. If they don't cry, you can finally sell your drug.
So, all of that has to be accomplished before you get a new chemical...and that's if you can find anything at the beginning in your vast library of options (which isn't as vast as you ever wish it would be). Otherwise, you wait for someone else to accomplish all of these things to at least somewhere around the mice...and then you buy them out. Of course, if you wait around for someone to get that far on a brand new target, you'll wait for quite a while, since most new, little guys won't have the library, manpower, capital, intelligence, or best target to even get as far as mice before going under...so there's always that problem too.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, they look about the same. Mother Teresa was a fanatic fundamentalist and a con artist with a sadist streak. The people in her homes for the dying endured cancer-type pain with analgesics no stronger than paracetamol. When they cried out, she would say, "you are suffering as Christ on the cross." All of the money donated to her organization went straight into the Vatican bank, not to build a teaching hospital as she promised. She also accepted a seven figure donation of stolen money from Charles Keating, the disgraced S&L swindler, and refused to give it back.
Bitch.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:5, Interesting)
It allowed me an interesting perspective, (imagine the many British period pieces you see where the nobility is carrying on their conversations in front of "The help" completely unaffected by their presence.) The tech fixing their laptop invisible to them in every way. Even if they are 1 foot away from them working on their laptop or wiring them up with a lav its like you aren't even in the room. (How you can ignore the person rummaging through your shirt and pockets is a mystery to me)
(This was the second favorite conversation I overheard there, it was carried on between two executives, right in front of me, while I was working on the microphones.)
"Everyone always thinks the scientists lead the way discovering cures and shit, but thats B.S., really we have marketing research what people are the most insecure of, what we can make the most money in treating, and then we tell the scientists to work on fixing it" (the conversation continued about what marketing looks for, wealthy and expanding demographics with certain ailments, tracking what well insured baby boomers are the most insecure of, and all the trivial things you can make a pill for, and the naivety and lack of business smarts of their scientists.) This isn't revolutionary I'm sure, but this kind of candor shocked me, These people really are as evil as people say.
(My favorite conversation were two executives talking about how they were "pumping and dumping" their own companies, firing and outsourcing as many people as they can to get short term profits up, get better bargaining power with "results" on their side, with no investments for even a few years in the future, and how great their parachute packages are. (It was a conference of executives on why CEOs are the unsung underpaid employees at a company, and about the wonders of outsourcing everything.)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
That is new wave Biotech, not Pharmaceutical or Chemical industry company.
I agree, most of the Biotech companies out there are overinflated and underdelivering piles of fraud. Before I turned to the dark side of IT I did an MSc in chemistry and nearly finished a second degree in Molecular Biology and Biotech. While my knowledge is a bit fossilised by todays standards, it is still enough to make me stand in awe at the insane amount of money being poured into vague promisses that are least likely to deliver any time in the future. The Dot-Bomb came and went, the biotech madness continues. Granted, we no longer have attempts to convert whole country economies to fit the madness like Todor Zhivkov's Bulgaria in the 80-es. None the less, it is still mad. Totally mad. For one small delivery you have decades of abject failure. Properly glycosilated human interferon anyone? Noone can still cannot produce the f*** thing 20 odd years after biotech gurus beat themselves in the chest that it will be available "next year". I remember messing with plasmids with this damn gene in 1987 during my first lab apprenticeship in high school. Where are we with it? Nowhere. This is just one example, tens of thousands of others.
At the same time, while biotech has never delivered anything close to its promisses, old good chemistry and pharmaceuticals continue to create product and generate profit as they have since the days of Nobel and the German industrial revolution. For most of its time this industry had IP protection only on methods of synthesis and purification, not on the actual compounds. This did not prevent it from becoming one of the cornerstone of industrialised society so I do not quite see a justifiction for it suddenly getting it now.
Re:I can feel the kindness & I can feel the fr (Score:3, Interesting)
Having achieved these patents with no more innovation than a few simple blood plasma level tests, and a few grand for a better pill press. The drug companies have proceeded to mark up the same substances 160,000%, 500,000%, 110,000%, 57,000%, 84,000% respectively for the top selling compounds. Even the illegal drugs markets for cocaine & heroin do not achieve these levels of markup in any form.
Similarly, the markup in generic versions of the few of these pain killers which have become generic is a startling 6000% above costs by the time they hit retail.
I feel so served by this regulation, let me tell you. I love government intervention in my ability to buy drugs. If they were so careless as to allow me to purchase directly from the manufacturer, I might be able to do such horrible things as buy a year and half worth for less than $25 instead of $740.00 a month for a single RX from community pharmacy. Absolute horror.
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:4, Interesting)
Your analogy is in error. The US Postal Service does not receive any taxpayer money to operate. This link explains how the USPS operates.> [usps.com]
Otherwise, I agree with you that any form of socialized medicine is undesirable. A solution to the high cost of providing medical care must be found though.
One change I'd like to see is for drug companies to stop shipping to countries that artificially keep drug prices low. Canada is a good example of that. US citizens pay, in many cases, double the price for name medications, while our friends in Canada get great discounts. Example: Diovan, a widely used medication for hypertension, is available from Canadian online pharmacies at, in some cases, less than half the price in the US. Are US citizens being gouged? Or are we subsidizing the socialist Canadian medical system, which many Canadians don't like.
I have no problem with making good medications available to those who need them. I'm just tired of foreign governments imposing their decisions on the US consumer and taxpayer.
Re:Big Profits for Pharma is Great news! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can feel the kindness (Score:3, Interesting)
2001 was obviously a bad year for certain industries (airlines, tech companies) so maybe that had an effect as well.