Report Says Patents Prevent New Drugs 381
An anonymous reader writes "Current orthodoxy claims patents encourage innovation, by allowing developers to enjoy profitable monopolies on their inventions which in turn inspire them to create new inventions. A new report by the non-partisan General Accounting Office suggests that this orthodoxy is wrong — at least when drug companies are involved. According to the report, existing patent law allows drug companies to patent, and make substantial profits off of, "new" drugs which differ little from existing medicines. Given high profit margins on very minor innovations, the report argues that drug companies have little incentive to produce innovative new drugs. In other words, current patent law actually discourages drug companies from producing new medicines.
Responding to the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a strongly worded statement suggesting that a legislative response will be forthcoming. "The findings in this new GAO report," said Senator Durbin, "raise serious questions about the pharmaceutical industry claims that there is a connection between new drug development and the soaring price of drugs already on the market. Most troubling is the notion that pharmaceutical industry profits are coming at the expense of consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer new drugs.""
More like: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not unique to pharmaceuticals. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you substantially increased the fee for patent applications then you could hire real experts to review new patents, and that might help solve some of these problems. Of course, many would claim that gave large companies with big coffers an unfair advantage compared to the little guy, and they would be right.
What are some real solutions to this problem?
Something different? (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize that making drugs (or any other product, for that matter) requires research and testing, etc., and manufacturers need to recoup that money spent. Plus, profits from a block-buster drug go into funding expensive research on drugs that can only target a very small portion of the population. However, making tiny changes to an existing drug and calling it "new" sucks, unless the change actually has an effect on how the drug works or reduces a side-effect.
Having said all that, maybe there should be a patent peer review board (or, in government speak, the PPRB) that reviews the validity of a patent request. Maybe patents should be harder to get and you should really have to prove your stuff is unique. After some of the vague, hand-waving tech patents, I've read, it's obvious that the guys in the government reviewing these things don't have a clue.
Re:Not unique to pharmaceuticals. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ [nyls.edu]
Re:A FAR more serious problem... (Score:1, Interesting)
As for the lack of vaccine development, consider the clinical trials. With a disease treatment, particularly for drugs treating life-threatening illnesses, you are testing your drug on people who are sick and will die without treatment. The risk and cost of harming a patient is much lower, and the results are much more easy to measure than with a vaccine, where you are administering it to HEALTHY people to prevent them from getting sick. As a doctor in a country (the US) that is so malpractice lawsuit happy, would you want to participate in a vaccine clinical trial or an anti-cancer treatment clinical trial?
In other words, it's not the patents, but rather the litigation that discourages vaccine development.
Thank You For Me-Too Drugs (Score:5, Interesting)
Pharmaceutical patents are a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, in a recent press release [accessmed-msf.org] they write:
By allowing the pharmaceutical companies to keep their prices artificially high, the patent system kills people every day, particularly in third world countries. And it's completely unnecessary.The standard argument for allowing the pharma companies to charge whatever they want for patented drugs, is that they spend the excess revenues on research for new drugs. But that is not true.
We can look at the numbers for Novartis [novartis.com], Pfizer [pfizer.com] or AstraZeneca [astrazeneca.com].
They all spend around 15% of their revenues on research. The number is typical for the industry. The other 85% go to other things, according to their own figures. More than half their revenues are spent on marketing an profits.
So there are clearly better ways to finance drug research than to hand out patent monopolies to the big pharma companies, and hope that they will spend the money they make on research. Because clearly, they don't.
The Swedish Pirate Party has one proposal for an alternative system [piratpartiet.se]. Many others have suggested other alternatives.
But at least it is time for us to start discussing the problem in earnest. Today's situation is expensive, wasteful and completely immoral. There must be a better way.
Re:So how would YOU say it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Exaggeration (Score:5, Interesting)
Without patents, patent-heavy fields like pharmaceutical research fall into cutthroat, razor-thin-margin price wars - but that is not a bad thing. In fact, it's not too different than desktop computers, where we've seen manufacturers keep up with Moore's law for a remarkable amount of time, even while having to struggle to break even on almost every product. Again, patents do not exist to provide peace of mind to investors; they exist only to promote progress. If ending them, and forcing pharmaceuticals to (*gasp*) innovate to stay in business (and even having a few go out of business when they fail to!) is the best way to promote progress, than that is exactly what we should do.
Of course, All of that only makes sense if Congress is competent and not corrupt... so much for that then.
Socialise it then (Score:1, Interesting)
Your a Pickle all Right! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Claritin vs. Clarinex (Score:4, Interesting)
> Enter Clarinex, which Schering claims is certified for both indoor and outdoor allergies. Once again, it's a prescription-only medication with high prices. The punch line: Clarinex is exactly the same drug as Claritin after Claritin passes through your liver once.
And even if Clarinex were better, they'd have no reason to release it until the Claritin patent expired. In fact, they'd have good reason not to release it.
Re:You're right. The FDA is useless. (Score:3, Interesting)
quacks kill.
the arsenic wafer said to relieve "female discomforts."
and sometimes fed, one suspects, to the male who was responsible for same.
the typical patent drug of the 1890s was a potent mix of alcohol and opium. given in stiff doses to both infants and elders.
Re:Exaggeration (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Exaggeration (Score:2, Interesting)
How do you "cure" aging?!? You can only treat it. I don't want to defend the industry because I know profit is the main motivator for the decision makers, but even in academia, the drug development process is the same and so are the goals. The only difference is that we can work on diseases like yellow fever and rare childhood leukemias that drug companies care very little about.
Re:Dental care? (Score:3, Interesting)
[1] In theory, at least. In recent years it has become progressively harder to find NHS dentists.
Disclaimer: IANAS(ociologist)
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Wales, we have something called the Technium Project. The idea is to have a set of buildings each dedicated to a particular technological field. They are filled with business incubator units (which are expensive, but quite easy to get subsidy for). The idea is that putting all of these businesses close to each other leads to sharing of ideas.
One of the buildings in the project is called the BioTechnium, and is intended for biotech start-ups. Since the building came online, only one person has been employed in it; the building manager. In spite of the fact that it was designed with biotech in mind (decontamination and isolation facilities, etc), there is not a single biotech start-up moving in. Why not? Because no one will fund a biotech company that doesn't have a large patent portfolio. You can't get into the industry without a cross-licensing agreement with all of the major players, and you can't get that without a load of your own patents to offer. The result? A barrier to entry so high no one can get over it.
Re:Polio and HIV (Score:4, Interesting)
The same interest in curing HIV exists today, its just a harder problem to solve.
It's also easy to blame big evil drug companies for providing treatments rather than cures, but what about the big evil HMOs, who want to minimize costs? Certainly Kaiser Perminente and other HMOs are interested in cheap prevention measures, rather than expensive ongoing treatments.
Another issue preventing drug use is the lack of any mechanism similar to patent protection to induce finding new uses for existing drugs.
Consider Welbutrin: it was found to work better than other anti-depressants for many people, but after a media panic stunt that associated the drug with seizures, doctors were afraid to prescribe it. It was later found that the drug was also effective in helping people stop smoking. The Welbutrin name was tainted that its company rebadged it under a different name: Zyban. It was then proven that Welbutrin had no real danger for most people, and the seizure side effects associated with it only really affected people who already had seizure problems, and even then had less risk than alternative treatments.
Then Welbutrin (busparin) went generic and the profit motive for finding and proving new uses for the drug ended. Sales went to generics manufacturers.
Meanwhile, studies where already showing that welbutrin worked for many people as an aphrodisiac and could help them rebound from problems involving low libido, among other things. Unfortunately, not only was such a drug considered too racy (this was before Viagra), but since the drug maker would have to spend millions in clinical trials proving its efficacy, it made no sense to do so because there was little patent protection still available on the drug.
How many other drugs have known uses, but can't be formally proven because the costs are prohibitive? It's obvious that patent protection DOES create a strong profit motive for finding new uses for new drugs, but it does nothing for drugs we already have and know a lot about - drugs we know are fairly safe, and which have promising new uses.
A non-patent system, where new drugs are discovered and new uses are developed by non-profit 'open source' volunteers wouldn't have the money to do extensive formal clinical trials, which take years and can deliver huge disappointments. How far would Linux or any other FOSS project go in a software world where every program had to prove itself flawless over a long and expensive qualification testing period? Software is wholly unregulated, and anyone can dump out junk and sell it. Drugs aren't like that at all.
The only system that works at all is the huge profit potentials offered by patents, and it has serious shortcomings. As long as the FDA restricts new developments very conservatively, and as long as people can sue drug companies and win huge damages for any risk involved in taking a drug, we simply won't have full access to the drugs we already have.
Apple's Billion Dollar Patent Bluster [roughlydrafted.com]
Re:Exaggeration (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because old Al Greenspan was a benevolent dictator with the Fed, doesn't mean that unacountable insulated oversight boards are inherently better than a transparent democratic process. It just means that we were damn lucky to have had someone like Greenspan all those years.
Any system that relies on having an extremly talented and knowledgeable elite at its head is a flawed system - it is a non solution. Once again it is an "appeal to god" (or other divinity)... There is nothing inherent in the structure or the form of the system you are talking about that would make it a better system - you just envision having some great genius or geniuses at it's head that will make things work well. Well, ANYTHING can work well if you have benevolent genius dictators running them - but that isn't something you can garantee. You must evaluate a system assuming a corupt and selfish idiot is going to be in charge. A good system should be able to function well, even with corrupt selfish idiots running it.