Drug Firms Freaking Out Over Expiring Patents
from the live-by-the-patent... dept
Glyn Moody points us to a discussion about how the big pharma firms are freaking out because their key patents are expiring, and they've failed to develop any new patentable drugs in a while. This is leading the usual patent supporters to worry and fret. Of course, the whole thing is backwards. As Moody points out, expiring patents should be a cause for celebration, not dismay. It means the public is getting access to all sorts of important medicines at much more reasonable prices. That's good news.The real issue here is that for years patents massively distorted the healthcare market. It hasn't been about keeping people healthy at all. It's been about finding patentable drugs to extract monopoly rents (often at the expense of actually keeping people healthy). Perhaps, if we can get past this silly and short-sighted focus on patentable medicine as being the key component of healthcare, we can start seeing smarter companies develop smarter business models that actually align interests: firms that recognize there's tremendous value in actually keeping people healthy, rather than trying to sell them a tiny pill.
If you start looking at the economic research behind healthcare, you begin to realize that the economic incentives around healthcare are totally screwed up. The reports have shown that keeping people healthy for longer contributes billions, if not trillions to the economy. If firms can't figure out how to profit from keeping people healthy, they're not paying attention. But that's never been the focus of our healthcare policy, and it's a shame. If today's drug companies are felled by their overreliance on patents, perhaps we can finally move on to rethinking healthcare towards making people healthy and improving the economy at the same time... rather than the current structure that appears to do neither of those things all too often.
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Filed Under: business models, drugs, health care, healthcare, patents, pharma
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So they didn't innovate in the good times, now the bad times are coming and they have nothing new to put on the shelf, ho hum ain't life a bitch!
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Well, doesn't that say something about patents? If those "key patents" were doing what they were supposed to do (promote the progress of science), wouldn't that have lead to more innovation, more "inventions" and (unfortunately) more patents?
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Extend them?
Of course, the true conspiracy theorists have already watched Johnny Mnemonic. (past the flashy graphics and Keanu Reeves you have at the core a company that makes billions treating the symptoms of a disease when they have the cure locked up...because it will only make them millions.)
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Source: Patentlyo: Patent Woes Threaten Drug Firms (Posted on Mar 07, 2011 at 12:41 PM)
They are already not meeting the public needs, what is the NY Times talking about?
They didn't produce anything new and are worried about their cash flow?
Further, those companies are not even the principal driver of drug discovery as most of the job is done by universities around the world.
Further in what world does it make sense to limit the production of something to only one company that doesn't have the capabilities to serve the whole market and makes less in net revenues than the entire market would have made and sold?
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How is it a loss??
I understand that it is incredibly difficult and expensive to bring a drug to market, with all the tests and trials that are required the patent's lifespan is half over before they even start clinical trials. But these companies need to stop trying to make all that research money back in the first year the drug hits the market. If they've really created a drug that is beneficial, then even when the patent expires and generics hit the market the drug will sell sell, create a profit flow for the company. So they are making 10 billion a year on one drug, but do they really need to line the walls of their corporate offices with gold?
I think the "war on drugs" needs to refocus its attention and start targeting these pharma companies, these guys are the real crooks.
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Re: How is it a loss??
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Re: Re: How is it a loss??
Set a drug dealer to catch a drug dealer ...
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Thinking...
They've had their windfall from findings that 50% of the population had some sort of psychological disorder and consequently needed some pharmaceutical to treat their problem. They are allowed to advertise on television which to me is ethically problematic. They've grown tremendously in the past couple decades due to all of this and now the market is heading rightly for a 'correction'. What more to do they want? F'em.
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less expensive for whom?
the problem with health care in the US is that the people who provide care (doctors, hospitals, drug companies) want to make lots of money, while the people who pay for care (insurance companies, government, consumers) don't want to pay high prices.
so dying quickly benefits those who pay for care, but those who provide care would rather you live a long and painfully on life support.
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Money money money money money money.....
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Re: Money money money money money money.....
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Big Pharma.
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Heck, hasn't that been done before?
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The old cow is dead. Didn't bother raise a new one.
That's because they have a monopoly and they can set any price they like. Once their patent expires, they have to compete on the same shelf with some generic maker that sells their product for $4 rather than $50.
Of course they want their cash cow back.
Being good American companies, they didn't bother to plan for the future and only focused on the quarterly numbers. So they never accounted for the inevitable day when their cash cows died.
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Massively distorts? I am guessing this is opinion instead of fact, right?
You don't consider that the lack of patents might mean that the medications would have never been developed in the first place (or certainly not as quickly) which would have had amore significant effect on the health market.
But hey, carry on with your one sides misrepresentations :)
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Citation needed.
Actually, Mike has provided ample evidence in studies that patents have hindered the proliferation of new drugs.
Until I see a filing from a drug company that shows that they actually spend more on R&D than on Marketing, I have NO sympathy for them.
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When you consider it takes years of research, testing, and development to bring a medication to market, it is amazing any of this gets done at all. Drug companies are putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, and are doing so at risk, in order to make the return on the other side. The patent time period (which is incredibly short, in real terms) allows them to make back and profit from their research and development. Do you honestly think anyone would invest the type of money they are investing to make the return levels that would come from competing with generic drug makers who have little research overhead, and similar production costs?
The medicines might get developed over time, but the comparatively sort patent time is a pretty good trade to get the research moving forward more quickly, to keep the investments in research in place, and to encourage companies to actually go through all the testing and legal risks that come with bringing a new medicines to market.
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You want me to feel sorry for Pfizer so that they can make obscene monopoly rents and control drugs that can help keep people alive.
You want me to believe that this doesn't have a downfall?
You want me to believe that because a patent allows one type of research, consumers can't make a decision from the generics?
...
All this leads to profit?
I'm about... (>years of research, testing, and development to bring a medication to market
Once a compound is formed, that knowledge benefits everyone in the form of allowing various forms of making newer drugs. Once you know the synthesis of a drug, you can build off of that. And the beneficial use of having consumer choice is ignored in this statement for some supposed belief that the fixed costs in all this = better research.
comparatively sort[sic] patent time is a pretty good trade to get the research moving forward more quickly
I laughed. Not only does this not pay attention to how ridiculous patent law has gotten, it also seems to believe that Big Pharma is doing some good in the community. This is not the case. India is hit with this from quite a few points to make higher rents on pharmaceuticals.
So if this is causing deaths in the fact that NO ONE can afford these medicines, then your entire "for profit" position is morally bankrupt.
What we actually need is compertition. What we need is for people to understand that those legal risks aren't because of some offensive need to get paid, but to actually help people and avoid the factory from blowing up from getting the formula wrong.
Think of the children...
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"Do you honestly think anyone would invest the type of money they are investing to make the return levels that would come from competing with generic drug makers who have little research overhead, and similar production costs?"
Ummm...those millions of dollars are usually mine since much of the funding comes from MY Federal Gov't who gets this money from my taxes.
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This is the same kind of mind who would like to patent numbers or mathematical equations or laws of physics if they thought they could make a buck off of it.
Sickening, reprehensible, and morally bankrupt: my only comfort is that those unfortunate enough to be near you in your daily life are probably as disgusted by you as I am, even if they have to hide it whereas I do not.
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Also you wouldn't believe the number of people who needs a job right now any job, they could all benefit from unencumbered production channels.
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You can't efficiently throw extra globs of money at a problem to try to force a breakthrough. Breakthroughs happen when many people have time to reflect and when pure accident facilitates a key observation.
And you also don't want a few firms that leverage the public sector and science to run out a bit ahead of others to snatch monopolies.
As for clinical costs, who says we need a monopoly patent grant to fund that? We can have those who want to produce the medicine buy a license to help make back those costs.
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Re: You don't consider that the lack of patents might mean that the medications would have never been developed in the first place
But it didn’t, and they don’t, and we do.
QED.
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New formula
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Because no gravy train goes on forever. It's a pity that big pharma and big media are having to learn that the hard way. They chose short-term profit over long-term sustainability, and now their decisions are catching up to them.
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What? That is the exact opposite of what techdirt has been saying for years. The message that techdirt sends on a regular basis is that patents are written such that they cannot be interpreted by anyone. Thus expiring patents are worthless. It is nice to see techdirt recognize that some patents really do teach something and really do benefit society when they expire.
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Wow. I don't think you could have misrepresented me any more than you did here. Nowhere did I say that the expiration of the patent meant that *the patent* taught others how to make the drug in question. Just that the expiration stops the blocking of others building a competitive market.
Troll on.
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My interpretation is perfectly fair, nowhere did you say *how* the public would get 'access to all sorts of important medicines at much more reasonable prices'. Do you really think that new competitors in the market are now going to start from scratch to develop these already existing medicines? They are not going to reinvent the wheel, they are going to use resources that are already available, like the expired patents.
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Drug Costs
Add in the cost of the majority of things that fail or that are abandoned because they will not be profitable to bring to market and the costs to a company escalate.
FWIW, I haven't worked in that field for over 15 years...
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Re: Drug Costs
Yes, you saw that right, 15,000%.
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/03/10/preemie_birth_preventive _spikes_from_10_to_1500/
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Re: Drug Costs
Haven't you figured out yet that little mikee and his worshippers couldn't give a rats ass about R&D, and production and development costs... Thos really don't count, all that really matters is how much it takes to copy something from someone else. Hell they can't even figure out how much datacenters cost even though little mikee has to pay to host his server too.
It's all about what they can take for free and how they are oh so screwed over by copyright and patents etc...
If even ONE of them actually PRODUCED anything they might learn the costs involved an why "finding other models" won't work unless you like the soup kitchens
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Re: Re: Drug Costs
Most drugs are actually fairly simple to make once you know how. The actual production of a single dose isn't specifically that expensive. However, knowing what combinations work, knowing the methods to combine the ingredients, how to filter them, how to purify them, how to get them into the right state, how to control their release into the bloodstream... all of those incredibly expensive things have to be paid for. Then there are the legal ramifications, the liability created in putting the drug on the market at all. The risks must be covered somehow.
By narrowly focusing only on selected parts of the process, Mike has been able to create a sort of cult like following where people ignore the bigger picture and focus on a single point in any given process. Inside those narrow confines, he is often right, but taken in the larger picture, he is incredibly wrong.
I have never once seen Mike explain how the development of medicine would be speeded up by eliminating patents. He only focuses on the apparent harm done to people who are trying to glom onto someone else's discovery and re-package for profit (calling it innovation, natch!).
It's a techdirt fairy tale, retold daily.
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Re: Re: Re: Drug Costs
A world without patents would be a world of experimentation.
Basically, as soon as a drug is released, someone else would take it and try a different way to do it, creating something new.
We kind of call that stuff innovation but it seems you only think about the smaller picture of who's getting paid for it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Drug Costs
Let me get this straight. A drug company that spends many years developing a drug and marketing it publishes its formulation. Another company then uses that formulation to create a new product in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost. And the incentive for the first company to produce another product is...???
Seems to me the first company is the one innovating and spending big bucks to do it. The second company is leveraging the development costs of the first one to provide marginal benefits. That's not innovation by my definition. It's closer to a non-symbiotic parasite.
Don't get me wrong, I don't condone patent extensions or long patent periods that violate the spirit of giving the public a benefit but there has to be a benefit to taking on the initial risk. If there is a better way than the patent system then present it and put it into practice. I haven't seen an alternative put into practice that works.
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Really, what happens is that scientists have just as much of an ego as anyone else. The race would be for a science group to put their stamp and say "I did it first". As it's reasoned out, this acts as a regulatory (albeit inexpensive) check. Larger companies have a drug and can market it for a higher price while the smaller companies make variations of the drug. Think about how we have aspirin and anacin. Now, if you go to Wal-mart and see aspirin for $5, the anacin may be $3. In order for aspirin to make money, they would HAVE to lower their price.
Right now, the generics are legally blocked from entering the market, which allows others to form monopoly rents to devestating effect.
So people shop around for cheap drug. Even to their cousins in the north
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Actually there is research here that we've written about. The first player in the market for drugs commands a HUGE premium, even when there is generic competition. Don't knock the first mover/branding advantage.
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Re: Re: Re: Drug Costs
Jesus Christ, you folks disgust me; you think that those companies invented everything they sell single handed? What the hell are you smoking? Most of the time people go to other worlds; you're in another damned universe.
Even if they had stomached the full R&D cost (oh, and that patent-related costs had nothing to do with the cost of , delivering the drug), and if you somehow include sales as a form of "R&D" which you apparently think makes sense, that would still imply that the drug prices should be proportional to the actual cost; that is, they should earn back their R&D costs, plus a tidy profit -- tidy, not obscene, not grotesque, not ludicrous.
So can you even sensibly begin to discuss the asked price of the drugs in question in the context of their actual production cost, in light of the 25 year window we're talking about here?
Oh, and while we're at it, can you explain why it's okay to let people die for the sake of profit, or can you justify defrauding people by telling them (or paying doctors to tell them) they need drugs which they actually do not (and are damned expensive) and probably have harmful side effects?
Probably not; I get the impression you'll just ignore this post like you ignore anything else you don't like to acknowledge or can't readily argue against.
What a worthless waste of oxygen talking to you would be.
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Thanks for reinforcing what I just said...
Is your sarc-dar really that poor?
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As for how much is a tidy profit for any given product why don't we just let you decide what that is? I'm sure you'll be fair and unbiased. Everyone will be happy with what they receive and be motivated to put that money at risk again to produce a sure-fire cure for cancer on the first try.
>>What a worthless waste of oxygen talking to you would be.
And yet you did. Oxygen is free anyway...
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This was a reply to #519, not you.
And although sarcastic (I hoped that was obvious... oh well) in nature, the point is that most of the "pro IP" trolls around here seem to think using any pre-existing knowledge is theft -- except when big pharma uses that knowledge to "create" a new drug.
And technically, I didn't talk to you (or the person I was actually directing the comment to); this is typing -- and yes, I meant 'talk' literally in that last sentence.
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Read about penicillin(the first wonder drug) and how it was discovered and developed.
Also most research is done in universities and not by big companies they just rip what others sowed, they are a cancer inside society.
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Cry me a river...
So cry me a river if your monopoly expired.
You had PLENTY of time to exploit it and pay for new R&D.
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Re: Drug Costs
Actually quite familiar with this. Not sure what that has to do with patents. Did you miss the point where I was talking about how much more money could be made?
Right.
Also, a couple of pointers on the "costs." First the actual costs are exaggerated tremendously. Merrill Goozner's analysis debunks the whole $800 million pill thing, and shows that it's really more like $40 million. $40 million is still a lot, but just get things in order.
Second, since much of it is clinical trials which is a regulatory issue, we should be looking for ways to fix that from the regulatory side, rather than dumping it all on the drug makers.
Finally, if you look at markets where drugs were not patentable, they did quite well, and were quite innovative before the patent folks came in and demanded patents (often killing local pharma industries).
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Pharma incentives are completely backwards.
Ex:
From least to most important to a healthcare company
Vaccine: lowest payback
Pro: everyone gets a shot
Con: That's all they need
Cure: second lowest
Pro: when they were sick they needed medicine.
Con: only people sick with this illness need the cure
once they get the cure they aren't customers anymore
Treatment: best
Pro: people who need it will need it forever (lifetime customer), if it's life threatening then we can charge outrageous prices (it's their money or their life)
Con: not everyone might have this illness. So if it's not life threatening, it should be vague so that we can say it works for the largest number of people.
Why should they work to find a cure, or heaven forbid a vaccine, for cancer or diabetes, or any of the other ills of modern society. A treatment is so much more profitable.
Even then, there are only so many people with cancer, etc. Now a 'lifestyle drug', there's something we can get everyone interested in.... just think of the money.
Of course failing that, we can just make up treatable illnesses like 'creepy ants crawling leg syndrome' or a nebulous mental illness that a majority of the population suffers from (and didn't even know about before we told them of our drug to treat it).
If you think I'm making this up then you haven't been paying attention. They've gotten otherwise normal rambunctious children 'diagnosed' as ADD just so they they could push their 'treatment' (a.k.a. drugs) to a whole new class of customer.
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Re: Pharma incentives are completely backwards.
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Re: Re: Pharma incentives are completely backwards.
There will be an App for that...
oops wrong story..
I mean there will be a "high priced Uni invented stolen by Pharma Inc sold for squillions" drug for that
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http://www.ftc.gov/opa/reporter/payfordelay.shtm
So the issue isn't the patents expiring, really-it's really how many of the drug companies are going to delay generics from being developed? All of them.
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Recycled Rx
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Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently proposed a billion-dollar drug development center at the agency.
“We seem to have a systemic problem here,” Dr. Collins said, adding that government research efforts were intended to feed the private sector, not compete with it.
Excuse me?
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I fail to understand why people think drug companies should be concerned with all the problems of the health care environment. Do hospitals worry or try to change how drug companies develop drugs? Do doctors concern themselves with how ambulance companies respond to calls? They are drug companies, they do their part and they worry about their part.
Overall health care involves many moving parts, the payor, the provider, the drug companies, the diagnostics and it goes on and on.
Can things be fixed? Of course, but to fix things you need to have a much broader conversation.
Want to improve health in America? Blame the sick. Ban smoking and fat people and our health will improve more than any doctor or drug can help you with.
Put health under govt. control toally (as it controls it now through Medicare and Medicaid) and you will see how quickly things go south.
For the record, I totally support generic drugs, once something goes off patent, you would be nuts to buy a branded drug, as long as it is a true generic.
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"Fat people" is not a bannable concept, barring a 1984 scenario where everyone is monitored by the government and forced to exercise daily. Furthermore, given that other addictive drugs are still available in this country despite the government's best efforts, I'm a bit skeptical of the effectiveness of a cigarette ban.
Put health under govt. control toally (as it controls it now through Medicare and Medicaid) and you will see how quickly things go south.
Cognitive dissonance: A statement that the government should control health, followed by a statement that the government should not control health.
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I'm not going to apologize for this.
FUCK YOU.
I'm one of a legion of people who have genetic conditions that can do NOTHING about them. I'd love nothing more than to not have to worry about finding insurance to cover the $40,000 of medication I'll burn through in a year, and never mind there's only one manufacturer for the drug that keeps me alive.
My two major genetic defects have no known source and feed into one another in such a way that should the one that actually has a treatment gets out of control, the second untreatable one will kill me.
I wish to god for a cure that will never ever come because the conditions are rare enough that there's not enough profit in pursuing it despite the research being underwritten by my tax dollars.
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Well, only in the U.S. because in Canada people love it, in the U.K. they also love it, in Japan, in Sweden, in Finland, in France and in a lot of other places, how they can do it and Americans can't? is the rest of the world more capable?
A heart surgery to implant a stench cost $10.000 in some countries, in the U.S. it costs $140.000 dollars WTF!?
Explain why others it is so cheap outside the U.S. that insurers are paying the cost of international travel, first class and still paying less.
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"“We seem to have a systemic problem here,” Dr. Collins said, adding that government research efforts were intended to feed the private sector, not compete with it. "
This is a problem with this country and its mentality. It's mentality isn't about helping the general public, it's about having government funded research feed the private sector that funds political campaigns. Helping the public is only a secondary consideration if even a consideration at all.
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Patents
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Drug costs consume about 15% of all healthcare dollars spent in the US. You can't fix the system by changing a small part.
Health care in the US is pretty good, you may not like how we pay for it, you may not like limited access, but I wouldn't trade our health care system for any other countries setup.
Drug companies success at drug discovery has pretty much sucked recently, this has been the trend for quite a while, and now the patent chickens are coming home to roost. I am not sure why there has been a lack of success and if anyone tells you they know why, they are lying. Maybe the easy drugs have been discovered, maybe we now have the technology in place that identifies drugs that will harm a certain group of people and those projects get killed now when in the past, they were allowed on the market, who knows.
I will say this though, health care is rationed. In the US, we do that with money. In some countries, they do it with time. We have to have a conversation on what exactly we want our system to provide. The majority of health care dollars is spent in the last years (or weeks and months) of life. Is this appropriate?
Should we spend millions on someone with a rare genetic disease, millions that could care for many "healthy" people? Should we tell the family that sorry, grandpa has to die because this expensive procedure will only give him an additional year of life? Should we tell that young couple that their premature baby won't make it because the costs are too great?
Ask any doctor and they will tell you that fit, non smoking people greatly reduces health care costs. Know what the greatest cost to our health care system is today? ESRD. End Stage Renal Disease. Dialysis. Get rid of fat people and most of that goes away. We are going in the other direction, what does that mean?
So you have to decide what you want out of our system. Drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies have saved more lives than any doctor out there ever will, but drugs are only part of the equation.
We have to decide what we want and how it is delivered.
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Why is it that people in Canada and Japan and France and Saudi Arabia fly here when they are faced with serious health concerns?
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