A tiny courtcase in a big countryFollow

This is one of the most shocking things going on at the moment in the world. Drug companies are killing the most vulnerable people on the planet because of these patents.

Meh. The article's wildly biased. It would be a bad thing if big pharma wins, but the reality is they'd replace the generics by literally giving away their branded versions for free.

It's a question of someone else profiting from their intellectual property, not of callous disregard for human life. I'm personally of the opinion that drug research should be a highly regulated public trust using public money, but if you're going to have for profit drug companies, they're logically going to pursue remedies like this when they feel their property rights are being threatened.

Are you saying that drug companies, like Novartis in this case, would simply give their own branded version for free to MSF?

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Color me skeptical. Are there examples of these mass give-aways in the past you can point me to?

Edit: I see RP provided such a thing if on a more limited scale than the program in the OP provides.

Edited, Apr 2nd 2007 7:23am by Jophiel

"Millions" would not die because of this precise drug, of course.

But the whole point is that India is the only large country that has such a lax patent law. So, their position as a generic-drug producer is quite unique precisely because of that law, which is being threatened by that court-case.



True, but for a lot of people, putting profits before the lives of some black people (that you hate!!) in Africa is not "sociopathic", but simply "business-friendly". I'm sure that if gbaji joins in this debate, he'll prove my point.

I don't believe that drug companies give a shIt about anything except profits. If public perception hurts their profits, then maybe they'll care about that too.

But I don't think they'll "fill the gap". They wouldn't have filled it had they won their court-case in South Africa in 2001. They didn't fill it before that court-case. If they do distribute drugs, it'll be symbolic, not effective.

I'm not saying that the situation today is any good, or that India is some sort of saint, of course. But their law on patent is incredibly useful in this respect, and were it to be struck down, it would be a serious blow for lots of poor people.

Personally, I'm all for letting the third-world population die out in this manner.

Personally, I'm all for letting the third-world population die out in this manner.

Yeah, I'd imagine most Americans feel about the same. Or more accurately they think "who cares, I don't know anyone in Africa"

he said it was like "Lord of War" over there.

People were offering him disease ridden hookers and cocaine mixed with gunpowder?

Doesn't sound so bad, really.

Corporations aren't human. Remember that. The times when that line is blurred they've grabbed at the chance to be protected under Human rights.

They are, in fact, doing so. Just to very few people. I really don't see any connection between India manufacturing cheap replicas and the drug company giving away copies except PR, which would cut against smash's assertion.

Perhaps smash has some kind of reasoning behind this he isn't sharing with us. It might even be right.

To the original point: drug companies aren't going to see any profit from the vast majority of these patients. If they could sue India, they would have to prove they lost money to seek damages. I don't see a winning argument here. India is keeping loads of people alive, but sick with incurable illnesses which can be spread to others. Some of whom can pay - and some of those will pay drug companies for the real thing.

The public (in many countries) pay for the research to develop these drugs anyhow. There should be a bounty on new drugs. It should be huge. The money should be required to be 90% reinvested in research. None for ads. Upon accepting serious government dollars, the companies should agree to accept the bounty in place of royalties - e.g. in return for the intellectual property.

I think the world could afford, say, US$10 billion per effective novel drug design. (Emphasis novel). There really aren't that many. Let the current system stay in place as a parallel system (except as per the above). And let's see who invents more drugs.

Who exactly makes those nations "needy"? I'm just curious...




Well I'm glad you think so. However, I reckon that MSF, who actually deal with this issue on an everyday basis and on the field, know a little bit more about it than you. Implying, as you are, that India's generic drugs have little impact on extremely poor people is a complete joke. When the cost of AIDS drugs went from $10,000/year to $130/year, I think the impact is not "gravely overstated".



Let me explain.

Evergreening is exploiting loopholes in the patent system in order to artificially extend their monopoly, something that you Republicans should be up in arms about.

For exemple, in the 80's, a drug's properties eligible for patenting included only the following : Primary uses, processes and intermediates, bulk forms, simple formulations, and composition of matter.

During the 90s, it grew to include: Expansive number of uses, methods of treatment, mechanism of action, packaging, delivery profiles, dosing regimen, dosing range, dosing route, combinations, screening methods, chemistry methods, biological Target and field of use.

As you might know patents are rarely applied to "a drug", but rather to "aspects of the products", such as the basic composition, including new or alternative compounds, the method of treatment, including new use of known compounds, different dosing, and therapies in combination with other drugs, synthetic production, formulation and drug delivery, prodrugs releasing active ingredient, substances resulting from metabolism in body, different crystalline or hydrated structures, gene-markers showing response to drug therapy and even devices such as patches for administering the drug. So, one drug will have something like 12 patents on it, a practice which is known as "picket-fencing".

All this means that by making minor changes to a drug, changes which might have 0 therapeutic value, a company can keep its patent for another 20 years.

And don't think all of this is "chance", it is a well-known and extermely common strategy in pharmaceutical industries, and, considering their raison d'etre, it is not surprising at all.

Now, this is where the India law matters. They have one of the most lax patent regimes in the world. For a drug to get a patent in India, it requires a "proven innovation of therapeutic value", something which a lot of newly patented tweaked-version of drugs obviously don't have.

Hence the court-case.

By the way, as a Republican, you should be applauding India's position, since it encourages innovation a lot more than the stale and monopolistic practices of those drug companies.





This case has nothing to do with this.

Absolutely nothing.

It's not about the "cost" to drug companies. I'm yet to see any of those drug companies losing moeny because of India's actions. That's the sickening thing. It's not as though poor people would've bought the branded version of a drug if the cheap generic one wasn't available. Instead, they would get nothing.

So those drug companies are not even losing money becase of these generic drugs, and they are not even "not making money". To them, to their balance sheet, to their accountants, it makes 0 difference.

To sick and extremely poor people, it's a matter of life and death.

So, drug comapnies use practices that are anti-competitive, anti-innovation, and detrmiental to the health of the world population, and yet they challenge India's laws eventhough the latter cost them nothing.

And yet, somehow, you've managed once again to argue for them. You are such a tool...





No. Have you ever checked their profits? Novartis's, for exemple? No?

Well, in 2007, their profit was $2.43 billion.

Sorry if I'm sceptical about their "loss" because of generic drugs for the world's poorest people.




And make a $2.4 billion profit in the process.

Not many issues are black and white. But if any are, it's this one.

The health of the world's poorest people shouldn't matter less than the billions of profits of one company. Not only that, but it is obvious that the patent law in India at the moment is not costing Novartis any money.

Those large drug companies are not in it for the health of the world. They are in it for the money. They are a business, and businesses have to be as profitable as possible. They will not do a "good action" unless it helps their PR. They will not solve the poor people's problems since there's no market for them there. I'm sure you know that they spend more on research for fleas on cats and dogs than they do on finding a cheap cure for malaria. You know why? Because the American market for pets is huge, whereas the malaria market is non-existant.

Putting the world's health in the hands of entities whose sole purpose is maximising profits is borderline criminal.



Edited, Apr 3rd 2007 10:44am by RedPhoenixxx

Widely accepted by whom?

That's the cost to make "that drug". But that does not include the cost (as I explained earlier) to make the 20-30 other drugs that failed at some step along the way and the company never saw a profit on. Now, they don't spend that full 1B on each of those because many fail early in the process, but they still cost the company money.

Everyone loves to look at the company with the new wildly successful drug and point at their profit margins. What they don't look at is the 100 other pharmaceutical companies who *didn't* make a new wildly successful drug and are running in the red and have for the last decade. They don't look at the investors and undewriters of these ventures, who have to look at the entire industry, not just the tail end of the successful parts of it (which is where the big name companies come in that most of us think of). They don't count the money that is spent industry wide.

It's a lot more then 1B per drug.



Yes. They'll charge what the market will bear. What part of what I said makes you think otherwise? However, natural market forces tend to create a system where the amount that companies charge for their products is related to their cost to product the product and the value/benefit that product generates.

This process results in a reduction of cost to the consumer over time. Always. It results in an improvement in the quality of the product over time. Always. What makes this happen is the very profit motive that some people seem to want to eliminate from the process. You take away that motive and the people who make these things stop doing it.



I agree. However, the proper way to deal with that is to be more stringent with patents (and I still haven't gotten an answer as to whether that grants them a "new" patent on the new product, or extends the patent on the old). I'm not opposed to India's approach to this. What I *am* opposed to is the radical opposition position that argues that we should take the private enterprise component out of the equation and simply subsidize research directly with flat rates from the government. I believe that that would be a disaster for a number of reasons.

The basic problem I have is when people respond to the occasional free-market excess by arguing for a complete replacement of that system with one where the government sets the definition of "success" and pays for it based on some semi-arbitrary set of rules. That was my primary concern, not India's stricter patent laws.




No. I'm not.



Ah. Nice little ad-hominum assuption there.

Funny. I talk about this all the time. How the methodology of the "cause" becomes a replacement for the objective itself. So "supporting socialized medicine" become synonymous with "helping poor people recieve better medical care". Of course, once you equate those, anyone who opposes the process you support therefore opposes the *people* you believe your process will help. And only coincidentally, it makes it easier to continue to support the process without ever actually assessing whether it's working or not. After all, you want to help people, right? Once you've made that assumptive equivalence between "helping poor people" and whatever methodology you've come to believe will do that, you no longer have to actually determine if the methodology is working.


You're supporting short term benefit at the cost of long term benefit. Which is a valid position to take. I just wish you (and others) would at least acknowledge the cost of what you want. When you walk into a drug store today, where do you think all the cheap and available drugs came from? At some point, they were expensive "new drugs". Every single one of them. Your fundamental argument is that it's "wrong" for companies to make those expensive drugs because the poor people of the world can't afford them. But those expensive new drugs eventually become the cheap common drugs that everyone can afford. You just have to wait. While those in need may want/need the best/newest drugs, and it certainly may seem unfair that they can't afford them, if we demand a change to the system such that those drugs are affordable (at the expense of the companies that make them), then over time the rate at which new drugs appear will slow and perhaps even stop. And then they'll *never* become the cheap common drugs that you can buy in a store for a few bucks.

If you're ok with that, then say so. But don't pretend that there's no cost.




Common sense? A more then passing understanding of economic factors? It's not rocket science. If you don't allow companies that spend massive amounts of money and take massive amounts of finanicial risk to reap rewards in proportion to those costs and risks, then they'll stop doing it. It's a pretty basic component of economics.

Would you invest every cent you own into a high risk venture if you knew that even if the venture succeeded the government would step in and ensure that your profit margin did not exceed some specific level? Or would you invest in something a bit safer? See. If the system we adopt artificially caps the profit margins, we also artificially cap the risk levels that will be taken. No one will take a risk beyond a point at which the cap makes it worth doing. Pharmaceutical research is *incredibly* risky. Arguably the highest failure rate of any business venture. Take away the high rewards for success and no one will invest in it anymore.


And don't say "We'll just fund it with government money". It wont work. Because the only way it would work is if the government either wrote blank checks for research (which would be a disaster because then tons of people would try to cheat the system just to get the funding, with no intention of generating a successful product), or if the government provided a high "reward" for a successful product. The latter would need to be sufficiently high to cover not only the costs for the product that succeeded but all the costs for all the products that failed as well. It would be *vastly* more expensive to do it that way. We're literally better off having the government subsidize the end product in terms of consumer purchase instead (like the health care initiative that Bush adopted that most everyone here slammed). Because then you're funding only "successful" products in the direct and exact numbers in which they are used by your population that needs them. It's the "cheapest" way to do what was proposed that will still retain the incentives for companies to bother to research new products in the first place.

But that's a horrible idea, isn't it? Yet I guess just plopping down a straight 10B for any "successful" drug is ok... Um. Hmm...

Dear gbaji,

You provide no evidence. Rational discussion ends. Strictly for humor value:



Virtually every high risk enterprise has been achieved by the bounty system I suggest, or total government funding.

And you still don't get it: my initial post clearly stated that companies would have a choice:

(A) Take significant government assistance and then you get a fixed "bounty" for the discovery

or

(B) Accept no government assistance and charge whatever you like.

As you continuously fail at reading comprehension, further discourse it pointless. But this is the assylum, so the particular charm you bring is part of the ambiance.

By all means, continue offering proof the name well deserved.

Your question contains within it one of the first flaws of your line of reasoning. You say "major players". Obviously the major players are profitable. But that's because the major players are the tail end of the process. They mostly buy out smaller companies when those companies hit on something valuable. But the total cost of the industry is absorbed by the investors anyway. I think you'd be surprised at how many pharmaceutical companies there are. You may know a half dozen "major players" names, but you likely have never heard of the hundreds of minor companies that do most of the truely new research.

You are correct that the big guys largely take what is already there and run them through trials and market the end result. That's because they are already big enough to be able to afford that. But the true breakthroughs occur at smaller companies, with names you've likely never heard of. Those guys go belly up all the time. That's where the high risk really is.

Here's an interesting article that I found when doing a quick search. It's an investment analysis of biotech/pharma companies. There's some very telling information there. An excerpt:



The 5.5B number is an estimated profit target that would need to be hit to make investment worth doing (at least that's what I got from that section of it). They're basically saying that while that does not seem like a lot when you look at a couple "successes" in the industry, it is a problem if you're looking at the entire field of companies. In this case 1400 of them. Clearly, a whole lot of those companies are going to fail to produce any profits so that a handful can reap that 5.5B (this was in 2003).


Um. I'm still poking around to see if I can find an actual table somewhere that shows actual bankruptcy rates of pharma companies in comparison to other industries. I did find a snippet in this article. It's primarily focused on Canadian industries, but there's a couple interesting points:



Unless we assume that workers in the Pharma industry get sick or pregnant more often then everywhere else, it's reasonable to conclude from that statement that pharma companies go bankrupt at a higher rate then others (or at least that people working in that industry lose their jobs more often due to companies going bankrupt).

And this little gem:



Hmmm... Greater protection of patents resulted in a greater percentage of sales being reinvested into R&D. In this case about 2 and a half *times* as much investment after the bill in question increased the patent protection period from 17 to 20 years.

Not to belabor the obvious, but that's a pretty critical fact when considering this topic. I've been arguing all along that if you remove the ability for pharma companies to profit (via holding and use of patents on their products), you will stifle the growth and research of new drugs. Here's some pretty solid evidence that I'm absolutely correct. R&D rates are directly related to how protected the patents are. And it's not exactly a confusing connection. If the companies know that they'll get a longer profit period, they'll be more willing to risk a larger percentage of their profits in R&D. If they don't, they're going to be much more cautious about spending the company funds and will restrict their research to things that have a safer return (which will also tend to be the less inovative products as well).

But no amount of facts will convince anyone I suppose. If you start out hating big profitable companies for the mere fact that they are "big" and "profitable", nothing I say will change you mind. Sadly IMO, cause you're being irrational and if we adopt those irrational ideas and make them policy we'll all suffer for it.