Should medical industries be allowed to make a profit?

[rakuenso]

The patenting situation is actually starting to get out of hand, since IIRC, the company Celebra (i'll double check when I get home) has even patented a segment of the human genome. Now exactly how do you copyright a piece of double stranded ribonuleic acids that could be present in the trillions of other organism?

[Skye]

I guess you mean Celera.

 

I don't see it as any different from patenting any other natural molecule. And that's been going on since the 19th century.

[rakuenso]

However, it seems like they own a piece of molecule that they didn't necessarily create and could even occur naturally. So if they have the patent for a certain sequence for a certain organism, does it also give them the right for the same sequence that might exist in other organisms?

[Sayonara]

Patents don't protect "things" as such, they protect methods or inventions.

 

Say for instance I patented a process involving the naturally occuring "Bacterium A" in the production of some consumer product or drug - it doesn't stop anyone else using Bacterium A for other commercial means or research, it just protects my rights to use it in that particular process. This is because the process is the invention.

 

If I had created Bacterium A and it did not occur in nature, a patent would protect my rights to anything involving it, because it would be considered an invention in itself.

[Kleptin]

The laws of economics apply, there are many great scientists doing their job to further mankind, but there are even more looking to make a profit. Competition inspires this, and there is no way to create a monopoly on pharmeceutical items...

[Commie_Pinko]

They should be able to keep profits, but there should be a way to help people who cannot afford to pay it, get it.

[ku]

If there is a way pharmaceutical corporations could price discriminate, perhaps poorer people could afford the drugs. What must be avoided is poor people buying cheap drugs and selling it to richer people, i.e. arbitrage. Perhaps corporations could inject the drug into people who can prove low income or prove nationality from a state with very low GDP per capita (not as good as proof of low income in terms of predictive power of individual wealth but maybe good enough given the difficulty of knowing someone's true wealth compared to knowing his nationality). There would have to be a way for corporations to do this cheaply though.

[Daecon]

#3. Can a company refuse the release of say a cure for cancer simply because it wants to hold on to the cure until more are affected?

There wouldn't be a problem if companies weren't allowed to make patents on medical treatments...

[coquina]

There wouldn't be a problem if companies weren't allowed to make patents on medical treatments...

 

There would be a much greater problem.

 

Patents don't offer much protection, but if they didn't exist, there would be nothing to stop a company from obtaining one pill and doing an analysis of it that tells them exactly what it contains.

 

Then, the new company can step in and manufacture that pill for a fraction of the cost, because they have practically no R&D investment.

 

As far as I know, all the pharmaceutical companies are publicly traded corporations. They get their R&D money from the sale of stock to their investors. Why would you buy stock in a company if there was no hope on a return of your investment, let alone a profit on it?

 

The only alternative I can see (mind you, I'm pointing out the possibility, not endorsing it as the answer) is to nationalize the pharmaceutical companies so they are owned by the government. Then the cost of new research is ultimately borne by you and me, because the government has to raise taxes to pay for the raw materials, the labor, and the overhead of the pharmaceutical facility.

 

Something else that hasn't been pointed out in all this - what happens when the company thinks a drug will work and after it goes into production a significant portion of the general population has an adverse reaction.

 

Merck just lost the first Vioxx lawsuit ( http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/19/business/vioxx.php ) - the jury awarded the widow of the man who died $253 million dollars. That is only one lawsuit, and there are many more to come.

 

In my humble opinion, if individuals at Merck knew that the drug was dangerous, and hid or falsified that information to gain FDA acceptance, those individuals should be put in jail. The widow should be awarded an amount sufficient to cover her legal bills, and enough to insure that she will have adequate money to support her in the manner she lived prior to her husband's death.

 

Taking "punitive damages" out of the corporation only hurts its future potential to develop beneficial drugs.

[swansont]

As far as I know' date=' all the pharmaceutical companies are publicly traded corporations. They get their R&D money from the sale of stock to their investors. Why would you buy stock in a company if there was no hope on a return of your investment, let alone a profit on it?

[/quote']

 

While that's true as a (generally) one-time method of raising capital, they get the bulk of their year-in, year-out financing from the sale of their products.

 

Another issue in all this is that many countries limit the price of drugs, which means that people in countries where this doesn't happen (like the US) can end up paying more, which means that we are affectively subsidizing the drugs for other countries.

 

And the people who think that reimporting the cheaper drugs is some kind of solution to the problem are probably the same ones who don't understand how insurance works.

[jdurg]

I think a lot of people also forget that the drug companies have to pay a lot of individuals for very different things. They have to pay the janitors, the security guards, the chemists, the board members, the accountants, the marketing department, the electricians, the plumbers, the companies that they use to handle their data, etc. etc. A pharmaceutical company has a lot more costs than many people seem to realize. Also, putting a drug out to market isn't a simple 'Looky what I made. Here FDA, let me start putting this out'. Drug research takes a looooooooooooooooooong time to do, and all that time takes money. The company first has to make the drug, then test it on animal species to see if it has any widespread dangers, then get approval to test on a small number of humans, then get approval to test on a larger number of people, then get approval to test on a long term scale, then get approval to test on a massive scale, then get approval to produce the drug in mass quantities and sell to the public, then continue testing the drug for the extra long term efficacy and toxicity of it. A full development of a drug can take close to 20 years or so. Also, you have to very carefully analyze every piece of data to see if drug A is causing condition B, or if drug A is being used to treat condition B, but is causing Condition C to completely cure. (As an example, when Viagra was first produced, it was produced to treat heart disease and cardiovascular problems. It was during the initial testing that they discovered all these male patients were now able to get erections. Still, they had to finish the heart trials and prove that the drug was safe before they could get permission to start the erection trials).

 

I work for a CRO which works with investigational drug data on a daily basis. I cannot get into any details about what exactly I'm doing as a result of confidentiality agreements with our customers, but what I can say is that the general public really has no idea what goes on with the development of a drug and what all the associated costs are.

[Drug addict]

Although it is essential that drug companies make a profit, there are occasions when they go a bit too far, and there are two main ways they do this. One way is to change the formulation of the product shortly before the patent expires and generics are released -for example, Tritace (ramipril) capsules were discontinued by the manufacturer and tablets introduced a few months before the patent expired, hoping that doctors would not switch back to the capsules once the generic was available.

 

Another way is to refine the manufacturing process slightly so that only one isomer of the drug is produced - for example omeprazole and esomeprazole, and cetirizine and levocetirizine. In the vast majority of cases, there is no clinical difference.

 

A more contentious point is the development of 'me too' drugs. So MSD develop simvastatin (Zocor), then Pfizer look at it, alter a bit of it to produce atorvastatin (Lipitor), and save themselves time and money in development. However, there are often clinical differences between drugs in the same class - atorvastatin has a longer half life than simvastatin and is more effective at reducing cholesterol levels than simvastatin is.