Let’s say a drugs company comes up with a one shot jab for a type of cancer. However, they figure they could make more money by patenting it, keeping it under lock and key, and continuing to sell the sort drugs we currently use to treat sufferers. Would this be legal?
In theory, sure. The regulatory hurdles to get a new drug approved for use on humans in the U.S. is very formal, lengthy and expensive. All the company would have to do is keep the details of the drug secret which they already do for other drugs that that are in the development pipeline and simply refuse to initiate the approval process. It would be dead in the water until the company decided to go through the process.
This specific scenario would not happen in real life but it does happen for some other promising drugs for lots of reasons. The potential market may be too small or the drug is too similar to another drug that they already market successfully for example.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be legal. The whole point of patents is to balance the financial interests of the inventor with the possible utility to the larger public. To get a patent, the drug company has to publicly disclose all of the details of their new drug, particularly the chemical structure. If they want to sit on it and not make any money off the new miracle cure that’s their business. But, when the patent expires 20 years after filing, now anyone can make the drug.
To fight the hypothetical, I have a hard time envisioning a miracle cure that would be more profitable to never sell. Drug companies are already selling new, high-price cancer treatments that have marginal benefits. If there was a hypothetical drug that really was a reliable cure, even conservative government health-care providers would be happy to pay six-figure prices if it meant not paying for years of expensive intensive hospital care and standard treatment. And that expensive standard treatment won’t go straight to any one drug company, rather it’ll be spread around to pay for drugs and services from a lot of different providers.
This almost happened with Gleevec, a true wonder drug that treats several types of cancer. At the time it was being developed, it was aimed at one type of lukemia and there are only about 20,000 cases of that disease per year worldwide. That was thought to be too few, so Novartis was considering cancelling it. Fortunately, they were persuaded by the developers to continue.
I’m not seeing this story in your link.
The fantasy about drug companies suppressing cancer cures is a staple among alties, but makes no sense. Significantly more effective drugs for certain cancers (like Gleevec) make a lot of money for drug companies. Actual cures in a high percentage of cases for a certain kind of cancer would be even more lucrative. A bombshell drug that cured multiple kinds of cancer would send profits through the ceiling and make researchers and the firm they work for rich and famous overnight. They could knock out their competitors with ease.
And a reminder: all of these pharma execs (and the minions who work for them) are susceptible to cancer, as are their relatives and friends. They badly want cancer cures like the rest of us.
Also, the researcher or researchers who discovered such a miracle cure would almost be guaranteed a Lasker Award and a Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with having their names in the history books.
And another reminder: It’s not the execs who are doing the actual research. If Dr. Bob the Scientist finds a cancer cure, and goes through all the tests, and it works, and Mr. Evil, MBA who runs the company says they’re not going to sell it, then Dr. Bob is going to publish his results, and go to some other company who will make it. Evil Pharmaceuticals, Inc. could probably sue Bob for this (he probably has a noncompete clause in his contract), but bringing that lawsuit to court would be the last thing EPI would want, since the whole point is to avoid publicity on this.
Once you’ve patented it, you’ve publicized the secret and lost a lot of control of how the information is used. If you refuse to produce the cure for cancer, there are plenty of labs in countries with less respect for intellectual property rights that will produce plenty of it in your stead. I’d imagine that China and Russia would become great medical tourism destinations. Of course, the impeccable border control of the U.S. would mean that no illegally imported drugs would ever make it into the country.
Cancer drugs are not at the most risk here. Cancer drugs are often funded as “orphan drugs” which get additional funding and extra patent protections to counteract this problem.
Antibiotics are another story. We know that the largest agencies are not putting the research and development into antibiotics due to low profits, because they’ve told us so. Smaller companies and creative changes to patent law are getting some work done in this area, but the FDA has approved just 9 new antibiotics in the last decade. Antibiotic Resistance: Why Aren’t Drug Companies Developing New Medicines To Stop Superbugs?
We also know that pharmaceutical companies tried to stop making vaccines, because the profit was low and, thanks to anti-vaccine myths, the risk of lawsuits was too high. The development of NCVIA/NCVIP, with a tax per dose of vaccine to cover the liability from lawsuits and redirect them to a federal court, persuaded them to continue making vaccines.
It’s difficult to find reliable news stories about quietly shelved drugs, because it’s obviously something that drug companies don’t want the general public knowing about. They’re not going to issue press releases about a drug that they decided not to develop. What we know about are usually the close calls.
My dad did work for a company that did pharmaceutical development (although his job was for another division) and yes, there are things that researchers get excited about that are squashed do to their unprofitability. It frustrates the researchers a lot. He often says, “The first dose of any medicine costs two billion dollars. The next two billion doses cost a sixteenth of a cent each.” But the company has to worry about that initial price tag, and whether it can be paid back in what they consider a realistic and appropriate timeline. It’s not that they’re evil, it’s that most drugs are developed by for-profit industry. That’s (slowly) changing, and I think it’s a good change.
The second Dr. Bob published, Evil Pharmaceuticals, Inc. would be in a “Release it world-wide by 7pm tonight or cease to exist” situation. If they even hesitated the mobs would tear them to ribbons, and the cops in any country would probably join the mobs. Especially if it was a wide-spread form of cancer. Now if it cured a very narrow range of cancers that only occur once in a blue moon, they might have a chance.
On a more general note, what kind of law would you propose to make this illegal? Should scientists be required by law to publicly reveal the details of every half-baked idea and in-progress experiments they have going? How are you going to enforce that?
I’m sorry, but it’s wild exaggerations like this that often cause people to tune out and ignore a very real problem.
It’s a joke. A joke which, like all jokes, has a bit of truth in it. But yes, I agree that pharmaceutical companies are often guilty of vastly inflating their R&D costs in order to justify higher prices, if that’s where you’re going.
How is that a “wild exaggeration”? Two billion is in line with estimates I’ve seen for drug development costs. The precise funding for the successful drug may only be a few hundred million, but somehow you’ve also got to pay for the other 90% of failed drugs.
I can’t say whether that per-dose marginal cost is accurate, though it seems like it might be right for some of the most popular and easy-to-manufacture drugs. (It’s certainly a wild underestimate for certain classes of treatments, including most biologicals)
Not only that, but people with incurable cancer die. People whose cancer has been cured will eventually get cancer again (unless we’re talking about some kind of hypothetical cancer vaccine?). Curing cancer is a good way to keep your customers coming back, the exact opposite of what the new age anti-medicine folks claim. Nobody is suppressing cancer cures for the sake of their bottom line.
I don’t think that would be impossible. No drug is a cure for cancer until it has been tried in a trial. A law could require that before any trial might take place, the details of the drug, what is expected in the trial, what a success and a failure might consist of and so on be provided at least to the FDA. And the medical journals ought to be requiring this information before the trials; else they won’t publish the eventual results.
This does leave open the possibility of a drug that seems to cure cancer in mice. I guess they could suppress it at that stage, but eventually word would escape. That’s the trouble with all conspiracy theories. Any conspiracy that involves more than one person (yes, that’s a tautology) is nearly certain to become public.
Also note that even for things like antibiotics that drug companies usually don’t bother with, the suppression (such as it is) is all on the R&D end, because that’s where the big cost to the company is. But if researchers working on a heartburn medicine or something happened to stumble upon an effective antibiotic, the company would be all too happy to sell that.
Any study funded by public money already has such requirements in place. It could be an extremely bad thing for pharmaceutical companies. Results of studies are valuable data. It teaches the company what it needs to do to improve the drug, and where to go next. Giving that information to a competitor would allow them to skip right over the years and millions of dollars that the first company invested to get to that point.
What you’re proposing is essentially that a private company be forced to reveal their proprietary intellectual property.
Meh, it’s easy to cure cancer in mice.
(old saw in medical research)
And even easier to cause it.