Comment by planck_tonne
1 year ago
Crazy how they managed to restrict the competing researchers from obtaining the drug.
How did they do that?
Why is the sale of a super expensive drug used exclusively to treat a super specific type of cancer even controlled in the first place? What is even the argument?
I couldn't think of any argument before. After reading, I can only think of "to restrict competition".
The argument in essence is that only permitting pharmaceutical companies these outrageous profits will induce them to continue investing the likewise outrageous costs of new drug development now that all the low-hanging fruit like antibiotics, and sildenafil and other antihypertensives, has been picked. This extends (usually by implication) to trivial variations in molecular chemistry which have no functional effect on a medication but which are used to extend patent protections solely on the basis of a structural change - a practice also visible in the history of one family of drugs I have mentioned, and one which without some sort of justification might be taken for an example of a law's letter being abused to violate that same law's intent.
Look, I didn't say I buy it. But you asked for the basic argument advocates make in support of such practices, and here it is.
> This extends (usually by implication) to trivial variations in molecular chemistry which have no functional effect on a medication but which are used to extend patent protections solely on the basis of a structural change
How does that work? Does it extend patent protection on the original molecule? Or if not, what stops generic copies of the original version?
It doesnt. A competitor can make generics of the original.
What is does is stagger coverage with version release so that you have coverage for latest and greatest version.
Generics are extremely common following patent exclusivity. By then, patients and doctors usually want the shiny new drug.
I found a menu. https://www.obrienpatents.com/extending-life-patents-pharmac...
it's not a great argument since iirc half of pharmaceutical company spending is on marketing; far far outstripping r&d
2024 numbers -- Selling, General & Admin vs. R&D
Roche (Pharma Division): 7533 MCHF vs. 11096 MCHF
Novartis: 12566 MUSD vs. 10022 MUSD
Pfizer: 14730 MUSD vs. 10822 MUSD
Eli Lilly: 8594 MUSD vs. 10991 MUSD
AstraZeneca: 19977 MUSD vs. 13583 MUSD
Johnson & Johnson: 22869 MUSD vs. 17232 MUSD
The left side here contains more than just marketing, and already "far far outstripping" seems like a mischaracterization.
For comparison, the average R&D spend between these firms is bigger than the 2024 NSF budget (~9bn) and bigger than 1/4 of the 2024 NIH budget (~37bn).
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That's part of it, but pharma is also a portfolio business, like VC or music; the winners have to pay for the losers.
(I don't know how much that matters in this case, where a tiny company lucked into a blockbuster and then used every lever in the system to protect their exclusivity).
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And a lot of pharma research is based on publicly-funded research in the first place.
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the argument might be, the more profits the pharma's make, the more available cash to buy out poltiicians or create SuperPAC's or whatever they have at hand..
America, the land of the dollar
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This is trickle down economics for healthcare. It is stupid. No, it is worse than that, it is evil.
Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1990s allowed universities to exclusively license researcher inventions to private parties. Hence:
> "Celgene had acquired the rights to thalidomide patents held by researchers at Rockefeller University in 1992."
Change Bayh-Dole law to non-exclusive licensing, but with some level of royalties paid to institution that originated the patent, and other corporations could have made the drug - and it would be a competitive market, so costs would drop due to lack of a monopoly on the drug.
This one simple change to Bayh-Dole - 'non-exclusive' - would upset the academic-corporate apple cart well beyond pharmaceuticals. Eg the PageRank algorithm created at Stanford could not have been exclusive licensed to Google - any American corporation or person could have applied for a license to the invention, entirely erasing the benefits of a monopolistic patent to the corporation.
One great benefit of this change is that corporations who wanted exclusive patents would have to finance their own private R & D divisions, instead of just capturing the output of taxpayer-financed researchers.