World Economic Forum Warns That Patents Are Making Us Lose The Race Against Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

from the people-are-beginning-to-talk dept

Back in June last year, Techdirt reported on the warning from the World Health Organization's Director-General that we risked entering a "post-antibiotic era". That was in part because the current patent system was not encouraging the right kind of research by pharma companies in order to develop the new antibiotics that we desperately need.

Stephan Kinsella points out that the World Economic Forum's 8th Global Risks Report (pdf), based on a survey of over 1,000 experts worldwide, has singled out precisely the same issue as one of the most serious facing humanity today:

Arguably, one of the most effective and common means to protect human life -- the use of antibacterial and antimicrobial compounds (antibiotics) -- may no longer be readily available in the near future. Every dose of antibiotics creates selective evolutionary pressures, as some bacteria survive to pass on the genetic mutations that enabled them to do so. Until now, new antibiotics have been developed to replace older, increasingly ineffective ones. However, human innovation may no longer be outpacing bacterial mutation. None of the new drugs currently in the development pipeline may be effective against certain new mutations of killer bacteria that could turn into a pandemic.

Those experts also offered their views on why they thought this worrying situation had come about. Their answer turned out to be the same as the key problem outlined in the earlier Techdirt story -- the failure of patents to encourage the development of drugs that maximized public health rather than private profits:

respondents to the Global Risks Perception Survey connected antibiotic-resistant bacteria to failure of the international intellectual property regime. This global risk is defined in the survey as "the loss of the international intellectual property regime as an effective system for stimulating innovation and investment" -- that is, going beyond the mechanisms of protecting IP to encompass the idea that the ultimate purpose of the IP system is to stimulate worthwhile innovation. The connection highlights a global market failure to incentivize front-end investment in antibiotic development through the promise of longer-term commercial reward, a failure which also applies to drugs to fight malaria and vaccines for pandemic influenza.

Rather than today's monopolistic hoarding, what we need is more sharing of knowledge, the Global Risks Report suggested:

There is also potential to use public or philanthropic funding to incentivize academic collaboration with pharmaceutical industry researchers, and more inter-company collaboration as well. Breakthroughs in antibiotic innovation will require pooling and sharing of knowledge among academia, private companies and government regulators. Companies and foundations like GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are pioneering an "open-lab" approach to research which refutes the idea that secrecy and patented monopolies are the bedrock of innovation.

Given Microsoft's fervent assertions of precisely this idea, there is a certain irony in a Bill Gates-funded organization being praised for refuting it.

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Filed Under: antibiotics, bacteria, patents, world economic forum

How Extending Patent Protection For Antibiotics Creates Perverse Incentives To Render Them Useless

from the monopolizing-ourselves-to-death dept

We take antibiotics and their ability to kill practically all bacteria for granted. But scientists are increasingly warning that we may be about to leave what might come to be seen as a golden age for anti-bacterial drugs, and enter a post-antibiotic era. As the World Health Organization’s Director-General said, quoted in an article on the Citizen Vox site:

"A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill."

The problem arises from natural selection. The more we use an antibiotic -- especially if we use it carelessly, failing to complete the full course -- the more we select for bacteria that are partially resistant to it. Over time, those bacteria thrive, displacing bacteria that are unable to withstand the antibiotic. Eventually, bacteria that are completely resistant to that particular drug are likely to evolve -- a situation that can have dire consequences. For example, even five years ago, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) was killing more people in the US annually than AIDS.

The obvious way to mitigate this problem is to reduce the use of antibiotics, saving them for truly life-threatening situations, and that's what's happening to a certain extent in Europe:

To preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics for human use, Europe banned feeding antibiotics to livestock for growth promotion in 2006. In Denmark, where such use of antibiotics had been phased out more than a decade ago, drug-resistant pathogens in livestock are down while industry output is up.

As the Citizen Vox article notes, a similar proposal to restrict the use of antibiotics has not gone very far in the US, partly because an alternative approach has found far more favor, for evident reasons:

the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now, or GAIN, Act has piggybacked into the FDA bill reauthorizing user fees for drug approval. GAIN would provide five more years of monopoly protections for new antibiotics. Already receiving three to seven years of exclusivity, some antibiotics may receive up to 10 years of protection after market approval. This measure defies both the economics and biology of antibiotic resistance.

The reason for that comes down to the nature of patents. Since they are time-limited, their owners have a natural incentive to exploit them as fully as possible during their entire term, when they can charge elevated monopoly prices. For other kinds of patents, that might be regrettable from an economic viewpoint, but it's hardly a matter of life or death. For antibiotics it's more problematic.

The more holders of patents for antibiotics seek to maximize their profits by boosting production and selling them as widely as possible, the more antibiotic resistance is likely to develop -- especially if they are given to livestock as well as humans. That growing resistance is a classic negative externality -- it's not something the pharma company needs to worry about, since the cost will come later and be borne by the general population in the form of increased medical expenses, longer stays in hospital, more serious infections and higher mortality rates.

Antibiotics are perhaps the clearest example of how the interests of patent holders are not only misaligned with those of the public, but are diametrically opposed to them in some cases. Although, in the short term, patents may encourage more antibiotics to be developed, in the long term they undermine their effectiveness. Even more than for drugs in general, antibiotics are an area where we need different kinds of incentives to stimulate development of new drugs -- government-funded prizes, perhaps.

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Filed Under: aids, antibiotics, denmark, europe, fda, world health organization

DailyDirt: Sketchy Meats For Sale

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A lot of vegetarians were likely inspired by The Jungle (the novel about the meat packing industry), but a lot has changed in the field of meat since the early 1900s. However, transparency about how animals are treated before they're served onto dinner plates could perhaps use a little more work. Here are just a few recent stories that are starting to gross out some meat-eating Americans.

• Gerald Zimstein coined the term "pink slime" and the substance has been in the news because of its "yuck" factor. But pink slime isn't particularly unhealthy -- or at least it hasn't been proven so (yet?). [url]
• Tuna scrape is almost like hamburger meat, and its use in sushi could become another kind of pink slime issue. So be careful with those spicy tuna rolls... [url]
• The use of antibiotics in food production might be getting out of hand, but fortunately, we can reduce antibiotics in the meat industry by using vaccines and other techniques. The concern is that we're slowly creating a world of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. [url]
• The enzyme transglutaminase is also known as "meat glue" -- and creating frankenstein steaks from cheap cuts of meat. While transglutaminase is generally safe and naturally occurring, the danger of using it comes from gluing together pieces of meat that may have bacteria contamination -- and when the glued-together meat is merely seared on the outside, the rare inside isn't properly cooked (and not sterile like the inner part of a single piece of meat). [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: antibiotics, food, hamburgers, meat, meat glue, pink slime, sushi, the jungle, transglutaminase, tuna scrape