Is it really all that clear? Is that just opinion or should I ask for a cite?
Nothing has really changed, as any country could always “walk away”. There’s just the small matter of international relations to consider.
Why should any company research new types of drugs if they don’t hope to make money from the production of the new drugs?
If you don’t like a system where private companies have the rights to life-saving drugs, governments could fund the research themselves and put the drugs in the public domain.
How often does that happen? If you want new medications you’ll have to pay for it someway and somehow. If you want all medications to be public domain don’t be surprised when companies stop doing research.
Ah, but drug companies put profit ahead of human life! Well, so do you when you refuse to pay higher taxes to fund medical research.
If we want science, we have to fund science. If we want new drugs we have to pay to develop new drugs. If you remove the profit motive from finding new drugs then you’ll have to fund research publicly or do without. It’s not just a question of one medication, you have to think about the future…where are new medications going to come from?
I always thought that this was a spurious argument. Consumers do not buy a product because it is patented, they buy it because they want or need it. Any company that is engaged in active research with a drug will have a huge headstart over those companies that will have to wait till the drug is marketed before cloning it. Between the time the initial company markets the drug and the time the second company successfully copies it and puts it through clinical trials etc, the initial company has been the sole entity profiting from the drug.
That’s ridiculous.
Why do they have to wait until the drug is marketed? Why does the second company have to wait to put their copied drug through clinical trials? The research has already been done by the first company. During clinical trials the drug isn’t being produced for sale, the first company only mass produces the drug if it turns out to be useful. The first company wouldn’t have a head start, everyone would follow the results of clinical trials and produce any drug that seems marketable. So…why would would someone pay millions of dollars to fund clinical trials for a drug if everyone benefits equally? I don’t see you funding clinical trials out of your own pocket, do I?
And even if a company did have a “head start”, should I be able to just print up copies of “Harry Potter” and sell them myself? After all, JK Rowling had a huge advantage because she had the text of “Harry Potter” first and could get a bunch of books printed up before anyone could copy her. Why should she be able to put profits before people? Why is she allowed to write a book but I’m not allowed to copy it?
The only alternative to patents and copyrights are trade secrets. Companies keep their techniques secret. This is the way things worked in the medieval guilds, knowledge was kept secret so that only the holders of that knowledge would benefit.
Patents expire after 17 years, they aren’t forever.
The equation is simple. Yes, governments can break patents and take whatever they like, they have the guns. But you can only do this a limited number of times. If private companies don’t benefit from funding research they’ll stop funding research. Taiwan can break any patent they like. But how much research into new antiviral drugs do you think Taiwan is going to invest in? Approximately zero. You can shut down the pharmaceutical companies and use their discoveries for the public good…but only for so long. Eventually they’ll shut down. Then what happens?
How are they going to get hold of the drug during the clinical trials? They can follow the trials all they want, they’ll still need to wait until the drug is marketed before they can get hold of it and clone it.
What’s your point?
The point is, testing new drugs is expensive and if we rely on philanthropy to fund new drug trials we’re going to wait a long time for new drugs.
Are you honestly claiming that the drug companies that today pour millions of dollars into drug research would continue to do so if they didn’t have the potential for millions of dollars in profits?
Yes, this research can be funded by governments. Some new drugs are developed this way, and those drugs aren’t patented. But the majority of new drugs are developed by for-profit corporations. Those drugs save lives. If the drug companies are no longer able to make a profit selling drugs then people will die. Why do you want people to die, Dominic?
I work at a biotech. We all have each others compounds WAY before clinical trials. We generally willingly share them with each other and public universities for testing because they are patented and can’t be copied anyway. In fact, if we publish anything on them prior to clinical trials, which we generally do, we are required to shar them due to agreements with the publishing journals. And for sharing them, we get feedback from others on their own experiments on our compounds.
Remove patents, and this stops. Well, all research toward drugs would stop, actually.
Your “logic” doesn’t make any sense.
Of course patients want or need drugs. They also want them at the cheapest possible price. Without patent protection, the copy-cat company can piggybank off the results of the initial company - which invested the money to fund clinical trials (as well as fund all the other “mistake” drugs that didn’t make it through clinical trials because the product couldn’t prove its safety/efficacy) - without having to fund the clinical trials, and thereby sell their drugs at a cut rate. If the generic
Since the chemical makeup of the compound is well-known early in the process, as FYL points out, why in the world would the initial company continue to pour billions into research and trials when copy-cats can swoon in and reap all the profits?
Again, there are a few points that are very important to consider.
- Most drugs that pharmaceutical companies make and put on the market are not that great. They are just ripoffs of pre-existing drugs. Aka another cox-2 inhibitor, another SSRI, another antipsychotic. They may have some benefits over pre-existing drugs, but by and large you can probably find a drug that already does what this new drug does. 75% of pharmaceutical innovations are just ‘me too’ drugs.
The majority of the new products the industry puts out, says Angell, are “me-too” drugs, which are almost identical to current treatments but “no better than drugs already on the market to treat the same condition.” Around 75 percent of new drugs approved by the FDA are me-too drugs.
- About 40-50% of pharma research is government funded. Plus pharma companies get corporate welfare and tax breaks.
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/econ/govrnd.html
A study of the 21 drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992 that were considered by experts to have had the highest therapeutic impact on society found that public funding of research was instrumental in the development of 15 of the 21 drugs (71 percent). Three-captopril (Capoten), fluoxetine (Prozac), and acyclovir (Zovirax)-had more than $1 billion in sales in 1994 and 1995. In addition to these drugs, other members of the group of 21 drugs, including AZT, acyclovir, fluconazole (Diflucan), foscarnet (Foscavir), and ketoconazole (Nizoral), had NIH funding and research to help in clinical trials.
http://www.phrma.org/publications/policy/15.09.2004.1078.cfm
Myth: Most drugs come from taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotech companies or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
TRUTH: The research-based pharmaceutical industry spends more ($32 billion in 2002) on biomedical R&D than the NIH, whose total 2002 budget was $24 billion. PhRMA-member companies discover and develop the vast majority of medicines in the U.S. Government funding contributes substantially to general advances in the health sciences, including basic research, but there is still a distinction to be made between basic research and start-to-finish development of a new drug therapy.
The problem is they don’t seem to be researching breakthroughs, most innovations are just addendums to pre-existing drugs. They are researching things like how to take the L-isomer of Prilosec, call it nexium and start marketing that since the patent for prilosec expired in 2001 and you can buy generic prilosec for 1/5th OTC at walmart what nexium costs. Or how to take wellbutrin and create something called wellbutrin XR so they can extend the patent.
I would be 100% in favor of doubling government sponsored R&D for pharmaceuticals, as long as it went to major, relevant illnesses that affected the world as a whole. Right now much of what the pharma companies produce are just ripoffs designed to get money from an unsuspecting public. People pay $100 for a ‘new drug’ that doesn’t work much better than a generic that costs $20 because they ‘ask their doctor about XYZ’.
I see your argument, really I do. But our current free market system of drugs is the best solution. Government funded drug discovery won’t work.
You can double the budget of the NIH. You can multiply the budget of the NIH by ten if you’d like. Then, you can ask the NIH to develop drugs, and in ten years time, you will have exactly no drugs developed.
The people working at the NIH are academics. I don’t say that disparagingly, but merely that the mindset is very different. They’re goal is to publish papers with their names on them and get grants. The infrastructure of publicly funded labs is set up to publish papers, not develop drugs. I can do experiments in an industry lab that I never could have imagined (due to financial constraints) in an academic lab.
There is a solution: start paying scientists real money to stay in academic research and start funding it for real. You’ll see the caliber of scientists improve, job satisfaction improve, and retention rate improve. Scientists are hands down the most underpaid people in the US. I’ve posted this before, but Harvard Economist Richard Freeman calls them “one of the greatest bargains in the U.S. economy”
(http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/08/23/4?)
noting:
“Where else can one hire Ph.D.s, whose training and smarts put them among the best and brightest in the world, to work 60 hours a week for $30,000 to 40,000 a year, with limited benefits and little power to influence their working conditions and pay? Given the long hours that postdocs work, their hourly pay is on the order of $10 to $13 per hour–on par with the wages paid to custodial and other low-paid workers that have spurred living wage campaigns around the country.”
seriously, read this article.
You’re going to take a tax hit to do it, roughly equivalent to how much you’re paying for drugs right now though. However start really funding science for real, and people like me would have stayed in academic science rather than going to the dark side. Had I been able to make a living wage in academic science, I’d have been happy to persue government funded drug discovery. But, I couldn’t so I went to a company that was willing to tap my talent and pay me for it (though they can still pay me relatively low wages because of the paucity of such positions compared to the huge numbers of academic positions, which don’t run on a free market economy). I don’t feel bad about that decision at all; I get to use my skills to produce potentially life saving drugs.
Say what you will about the system’s merits, but it’s hardly a “free market” when the government is handing out monopolies.
Yeah, after sleeping on it I realise that I’m wrong. I retract my argument.
Good article but it was about postdocs. Postdoc appointments are about 1-3 years long. If you graduate when you are 27 with your PhD in biochemistry and do a 3 year postdoc you still have 35-40 years of career ahead of you. Medical residents have the same problem, they do 80 hour workweeks for 30k a year but it is only temporary. I am for increasing the ability of academics to make a living, but there are still tenured faculty at universities who are able to do research for a liveable wage in the 80k ranges. Plus there are graduate students and undergraduate students who also do research at universities for little/no pay.
And again, one of the articles I listed earlier showed most blockbuster drugs had government funding in one form or another in their development.
“A study of the 21 drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992 that were considered by experts to have had the highest therapeutic impact on society found that public funding of research was instrumental in the development of 15 of the 21 drugs (71 percent).”
The mentality of academia and industry are different but academia sets the groundwork for industry to create new ideas. And again, most drugs are not that great anyway, about 3/4 are no better than pre-existing drugs. Where is this 30 billion in R&D going if all the companies are doing is ripping off pre-existing drugs?
If you graduate at 27 and only do 3 years of postdoc and then get a tenure track appointment you would be quite the exception. Averages for those are graduation at about 32 and 7-8 years of postdoc before a tenure track position. Plus, most (I believe it is 89%) postdocs NEVER get a tt position. Postdocs are 3 year appointments (minimum, generally) but you have to do a minimum of two before you’ll be considerred for a tt position unless you pull a Nature paper during that period. In other words, in a good scenario, you’re 40 when you are an assistant professor, and 95 out of 100 people that you started graduate school with are no longer even seeking tenure track positions.
There is about one postdoc for every tt position in the biomedical sciences. Meaning, that unless every tt person retires in the next five years, most of those postdocs are going to be either playing musical chairs for ten years to get the odd position that pops up, or is going to quit playing altogether and enter the private sector.
I’m not going to argue that the basic science is the ground work for the drug industry. I will, however, give my personal opinion that the cost R&D, even at the basic science level, is pricing universities and the NIH out of the market. The techniques used today from microarray analysis to knockout mouse technology are very, very expensive, and universities can’t hope to compete for much longer. Much of the good basic science is coming from companies these days, and the percentage is likely to increase over the next ten years. Type a good company name into a pubmed search and you’ll pull up as much good basic science as you will if you type in “Yale”.
The days of a lone guy accidentally happening upon an antibiotic in his basement are over. If a drug makes it through preclinical and clinical trials, hundreds of people have had a hand in its development. Those people need salaries. Drug discovery is expensive. Just because a guy at Harvard initially cloned out a gene that turned out to be a nice target in cancer, does not mean he “laid the groundwork” for the eventual drug.
And to say that 3/4 are no better than pre-existing drugs, while likely true, is a bit misleading. In a system like biology, where your system is likely much different than mine, even if two different drugs have the same efficacy across a population (both drug X and drug Y are 60% effective in treating a given disease), it is very possible, even likely, that drug X causes horrible side effects for you, while working nicely for me and vice versa; it’s nice to have as many drugs as possible, even if they have the same efficacy, in order to offer a second option should one drug not work for an individual. I’m not going to argue that there aren’t worthless “me too” drugs, but I think they are in the minority.
You don’t, you go bankrupt, and we as a society replace your company with a publically funded foundation that employs scientists doing research for the public good, and won’t treat African refugees as their private test subjects.
Companies like yours will no longer be able to patent ideas such as “Wireless networking” and then hold people in court trying to sue them with such a ridiculous concept.
On the other hand if you are making something difficult to produce like microprocessors, your profit margin will remain viable because your company will have the fabrication plants in the best position to pump them out, and your trusted name will entice people to buy your product.
If you are an individual you will have to find a way to support yourself with a practical application of your ideas. If you are a writer, perhaps your fans will be willing to drop you a bone on the donations link at your website. The more people that like your book, the more donations you’ll get, and this will determine how well you survive.
Software advancement will continue as ever through the efforts of people in the open source community who will continue to make applications as a work for hire for companies that need them, who will appreciate them as artisans. There will be endless work in the IT sector for people to help facillitate implementation.
Artists will continue to starve as they always have, unless they find a clever way to collectivize or find patronage. This sector notices the change with intellectual curiousity and little more.
The increasing spread of internet technology across the globe will result in an increasing wealth of information on herbal and natural remedies to the more common ailments, and a burgeoning market of mail order herbs from far corners of the globe will arise.
Erek
I think my hippyometer just broke.
Marc
Glad to be of service. If the mainstream government keeps going the way it’s been going it’s gonna go broke soon, and my method will win by default.
I intend to make a living supplying consulting services to bring homes off the power grid in the next few years. It’ll be fun to get rich while smashing the old systems, and doing it 100% legally. A good buddy of mine is creating a biodiesel refinery, he’ll be supplying biodiesel to trucking companies for less than diesel. While all the old power structures are arguing amongst themselves with their NGO conferences in different locations around the world, the world is moving toward a lateral distributed economy. They’re going to unveil their master plan just in time for the average people of the world to tell them to f*** off.
Erek
Attempting an academic career as an assistant professor is not uncommon after a postdoc. I don’t know enough about your numbers but from what I’ve seen with my professors it seems that you do your PhD then a postdoc (occasionally two) and then become an assistant professor.
You are right about the 3/4th thing I have heard alot of people on this board and in real life talk about how one SSRI didn’t work but another did, or how they were allergic to one antibiotic but could take another one. But this doesn’t really change my main point that by and large a new drug is not going to be much different than a pre-existing drug. There are eight SSRIs, and I doubt there are alot of people who get terrible reactions with all eight and who don’t respond to any of the other drugs for depression (MAO-Is, SDRI, SNRI, tricyclics) but who get great results with that ninth SSRI.
And again R&D doesn’t seem to be a gigantic aspect of the budget overall. It is about 25-30 billion in private and 25-30 billion in public funds, I would have no problem with paying extra in taxes and for pharmaceuticals if I knew that money was going to raise R&D spending. However the idea that the government should fund half of R&D, then give tax incentives to companies who spend as much time creating largely unnecessary drugs with a large market value (like nexium) and have no say in drug pricing isn’t fair.
I see this as akin to eminent domain - Roche is sitting on a piece of real estate that the government needs badly right now. I think Roche should be compensated, but they shouldn’t be able to stand in the way of Taiwan having enough drug.
Obviously this should be done under exceptional circumstances only - but bird flu is exceptional. Lack of adequate Tamiflu may have a far bigger impact on the economy than any instance of breaking patent could possibly do. This protects the world economy, it doesn’t harm it.
Roche is going to get an enormous windfall off of bird flu, no matter what, so I don’t see how Taiwan’s breaking patent is going to end up discouraging them from making more antivirals. In fact I’d say there’s never a danger that pharmaceutical companies are going to stop trying to make drugs which may be so desperately needed that some governments are forced to break patents to manufacture them.