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> In the global industry, some of the best kept secrets are those necessary to make life-saving medication and other pharmaceutical products. What? Patents are

> In the global industry, some of the best kept secrets are those necessary to make life-saving medication and other pharmaceutical products. What? Patents are not secret. Patents are the opposite of secret. The very word "patent" means "open". Are drug patents some kind of trick to do the opposite of what a patent is supposed to do? > However, when the researchers designated some atoms and bond as untouchable, the program proposed plans that avoided the patented ones. Can someone explain just exactly how do drug patents work? Can this legally work? I understand that normally patents cover processes or working inventions. I didn't think that the precise chemical bonds were required to be produced in the final output of a patent. Also, since apparently the researchers have read the patents in question and designed their software to produce drugs that avoid those patents, have they willfully infringed? Since they were aware of the patent and the process by which the drug worked, so using this knowledge they produced similar drugs that do the same thing? I assume that the researchers know drug patent law well enough and are confident that their method avoids patents, so there's obviously a lot I don't understand.

sigstoat 8y ago
> I understand that normally patents cover processes... > since apparently the researchers have read the patents in question and designed their software to produce drugs that avoid those patents, have they willfully infringed? the patents cover process, not the resultant molecule. the program finds a different process to make the same thing.
sp527 8y ago
Yea it’s important to note these guys are risking breaking the industry. If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development.
- drieddust 8y ago
  Book Bad Pharma thoroughly debunks this idea. These companies spend more time and money in lobbying, marketing, and rehashing the old research.
  - anovikov 8y ago
    This is how is it in every industry. Almost every startup spends more money on boosting traffic and sales than on coding the product itself, too.
    - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
      There are some differences between a company charging $270,000/year for a medication you need to survive [1] and a company trying to sell you on 'Uber for dry cleaning,' or whatever. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/orphan-drugs/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/orphan-drugs/
      - anovikov 8y ago
        But wait, these drugs won't even exist if they didn't charge as much. They are needed by very few people (so if the price was $1000 they won't boost the number of patients so much, as the diseases are very rare), and drug research and regulatory process of approval is very expensive.
        geofft 8y ago
        I'm not convinced drug research is expensive. I've met grad students. I've seen how much they do and how much they get paid. That leaves the regulatory process, and if the problem is government intervention in the free market with overtones of regulatory capture (drug regulation being too excessive), the solution is certainly not more government intervention in the free market with overtones of regulatory capture (patents).
        aaronbrethorst 8y ago
        That leaves the regulatory process Well, that and rampant price gouging. the solution is certainly not more government intervention in the free market You should really listen to the podcast I linked to above.
- beautifulfreak 8y ago
  Pharma companies don't do their own R&D anymore, for the most part. The documentary, Drug$ (2018) does a tough takedown of the industry. Pharma companies acquire drugs from indie or academic researchers. What pharma companies do is get the drugs FDA approved then market them, and at the highest price the market will bear (meaning that some people can't afford them). In other words, there are no R&D expenses. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7394770/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7394770/
  - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    >at the highest price the market will bear (meaning that some people can't afford them) If anyone can't afford your drugs, this is an issue of insufficiently optimized price discrimination (as long as what they can afford is above the marginal cost of manufacture). There's often manufacturer's coupons for exactly this reason - make a compelling case about what you can afford, and the manufacturer will drop prices until you can give them some money instead of none.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      I'm no economist, but I strongly feel perfect price discrimination would be a rather terrible thing. You seem to be implying that it would be "sufficient". Imagine if the water you drink was priced at the maximum amount you would be willing to pay not to die of thirst. This would palpably be a terrible thing. All of us go around every day buying things that we think are worth substantially more to us than the money we pay. It seems to me like this is the whole value proposition of capitalism for human beings. I have always thought that free markets are useful, but I think that is only the case if they tend to drive producer surplus to zero and consumer surplus to the maximum. If there were no consumer surplus, as with perfect discrimination, then I don't see the point of economic activity. I sort of thought (because I read it somewhere) that orthodox economic theory implied that perfect free markets should drive economic profits of businesses to zero. And profits should be roughly equivalent to producer surplus. So we shouldn't be balancing consumer and producer surplus, let alone allocating the surplus all to producers.
- geofft 8y ago
  > If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development. I'd like to see any evidence at all for this. The closest thing we have to a controlled experiment is the software industry, where patents are a) difficult to obtain, at least in a way analogous to patenting a molecule and b) not culturally common among large portions of the R&D community. There is a huge amount of R&D into better databases, better operating systems, better distributed systems, better UIs, better programming languages, better compilers, etc. etc. that happens with no patent protection, and often with no license fees or other direct monetary compensation at all. Microsoft being willing to keep their source code secret and patent their techniques didn't help NT defeat Linux one bit, and certainly has caused no loss of people willing to work on Linux.
exmadscientist 8y ago
> Can someone explain just exactly how do drug patents work? Can this legally work? I understand that normally patents cover processes or working inventions. I didn't think that the precise chemical bonds were required to be produced in the final output of a patent. A big part of it is that drug patents cover the process of production that gives the final molecule with viable yields. Pharmaceutical companies try to write patents broadly enough, or just file enough different patents, that there's no way to get to the final product without infringing one or more of their patents. The idea here is to come up with a sufficiently novel synthesis pathway that the original patents don't cover it, and thereby don't apply. Derek Lowe has a good discussion: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/automated-route-finding-and-patent-busting http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/aut...
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  >>Pharmaceutical companies try to write patents broadly enough, or just file enough different patents, that there's no way to get to the final product without infringing one or more of their patents. The patent can also be thrown out if it's to broad, no? The broader it is , the better the chances that there's prior art. Sure it costs money, but then there's money to be made so someone will sue
  - belorn 8y ago
    In theory yes. In practice we except the patent to be rejected by a government department which value is measured in number of granted patents, or a special court which is infamous known to favor patents over rejecting them and which previous chief Judge was himself a previous patent lawyer. The cost of getting a patent invalid is also very minor. There is no requirement to pay back the extracted rent by the time the patent get invalidated. The author also has many chances to rewrite a challenged patent and remove over broad claims. The risk vs reward of making broad claims in patents is evidentially in favor of risk.
adamzk 8y ago
I'm a patent holder for a pharmaceutically relevant class of compounds. There are two types of patents typically seen in pharma. One is procedural (how the drug is synthesized, isolated, formulated or administered) and another is composition of matter (the atoms in the molecule, their relative coordinates and the lengths and types of bonds that connect them). This program takes a target compound and does two things. 1) produces a library of similar compounds by structural diversification (making substitutions of atoms or small groups of atoms in the target compound with other atoms or groups which are known to behave similarly) with restrictions based on what has been patented under composition of matter. 2) It then takes each molecule and looks for ways it can be synthesized. It does this by breaking apart the molecule piece by piece until it obtains commercially available building blocks. These piecewise separations correspond to synthetic a steps in the other direction, which the program screens for literature precedence. It does this for every possible combination of piecewise separations until it finds a set of viable pathways from available compounds to the target. This is called retro synthesis. It then filters the potential synthetic routes for those that are covered by procedural patents until it has a list of non patented, commercially viable synthesis plans. As you can imagine there are thousands of ways a moderately complex molecule could be deconstructed and the bank of known reactions is more than any one person can really grasp. That and the myriad patent literature and how cryptic and dense it can be make the problem particularly suited for algorithmic treatment. This is only being done now because cataloging all the research and patent literature (which goes back to the late 1800s) and digitally formatting in a way that allows it to be computationally analyzed and processed requires manual translation of each report by a human being. Not many people have the expertise required for this and those that do usually prefer less menial work. So it has taken this long to amass a digital library of sufficient size to give one confidence that the answers it provides are comprehensive and that further searching would be pointless.
- yholio 8y ago
  > The research team hope that their software could help pharmaceutical companies in the protection of their intellectual property, and to hasten research into organic chemistry. It seems what they are attempting to sell is a IP protection service: let us show you other molecules and synesis routes you should also patent defensively, without actually attempting them in practice. Pretty soon you will have algorithmically defined patents. It's IP anti-science at it's worst.
Symmetry 8y ago
>The very word "patent" means "open". I was really surprised by that. So when Elizabeth I sold a patent for the monopoly of salt to some duke in order to raise gold for the crown the word "patent" meant that it was a public rather than a secret decree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_patent

sigstoat 8y ago

> I understand that normally patents cover processes... > since apparently the researchers have read the patents in question and designed their software to produce drugs that avoid those patents, have they willfully infringed? the patents cover process, not the resultant molecule. the program finds a different process to make the same thing.

sp527 8y ago

Yea it’s important to note these guys are risking breaking the industry. If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development.

drieddust 8y ago
Book Bad Pharma thoroughly debunks this idea. These companies spend more time and money in lobbying, marketing, and rehashing the old research.
- anovikov 8y ago
  This is how is it in every industry. Almost every startup spends more money on boosting traffic and sales than on coding the product itself, too.
  - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
    There are some differences between a company charging $270,000/year for a medication you need to survive [1] and a company trying to sell you on 'Uber for dry cleaning,' or whatever. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/orphan-drugs/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/orphan-drugs/
    - anovikov 8y ago
      But wait, these drugs won't even exist if they didn't charge as much. They are needed by very few people (so if the price was $1000 they won't boost the number of patients so much, as the diseases are very rare), and drug research and regulatory process of approval is very expensive.
      - geofft 8y ago
        I'm not convinced drug research is expensive. I've met grad students. I've seen how much they do and how much they get paid. That leaves the regulatory process, and if the problem is government intervention in the free market with overtones of regulatory capture (drug regulation being too excessive), the solution is certainly not more government intervention in the free market with overtones of regulatory capture (patents).
        aaronbrethorst 8y ago
        That leaves the regulatory process Well, that and rampant price gouging. the solution is certainly not more government intervention in the free market You should really listen to the podcast I linked to above.
beautifulfreak 8y ago
Pharma companies don't do their own R&D anymore, for the most part. The documentary, Drug$ (2018) does a tough takedown of the industry. Pharma companies acquire drugs from indie or academic researchers. What pharma companies do is get the drugs FDA approved then market them, and at the highest price the market will bear (meaning that some people can't afford them). In other words, there are no R&D expenses. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7394770/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7394770/
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  >at the highest price the market will bear (meaning that some people can't afford them) If anyone can't afford your drugs, this is an issue of insufficiently optimized price discrimination (as long as what they can afford is above the marginal cost of manufacture). There's often manufacturer's coupons for exactly this reason - make a compelling case about what you can afford, and the manufacturer will drop prices until you can give them some money instead of none.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I'm no economist, but I strongly feel perfect price discrimination would be a rather terrible thing. You seem to be implying that it would be "sufficient". Imagine if the water you drink was priced at the maximum amount you would be willing to pay not to die of thirst. This would palpably be a terrible thing. All of us go around every day buying things that we think are worth substantially more to us than the money we pay. It seems to me like this is the whole value proposition of capitalism for human beings. I have always thought that free markets are useful, but I think that is only the case if they tend to drive producer surplus to zero and consumer surplus to the maximum. If there were no consumer surplus, as with perfect discrimination, then I don't see the point of economic activity. I sort of thought (because I read it somewhere) that orthodox economic theory implied that perfect free markets should drive economic profits of businesses to zero. And profits should be roughly equivalent to producer surplus. So we shouldn't be balancing consumer and producer surplus, let alone allocating the surplus all to producers.
geofft 8y ago
> If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development. I'd like to see any evidence at all for this. The closest thing we have to a controlled experiment is the software industry, where patents are a) difficult to obtain, at least in a way analogous to patenting a molecule and b) not culturally common among large portions of the R&D community. There is a huge amount of R&D into better databases, better operating systems, better distributed systems, better UIs, better programming languages, better compilers, etc. etc. that happens with no patent protection, and often with no license fees or other direct monetary compensation at all. Microsoft being willing to keep their source code secret and patent their techniques didn't help NT defeat Linux one bit, and certainly has caused no loss of people willing to work on Linux.

exmadscientist 8y ago

> Can someone explain just exactly how do drug patents work? Can this legally work? I understand that normally patents cover processes or working inventions. I didn't think that the precise chemical bonds were required to be produced in the final output of a patent. A big part of it is that drug patents cover the process of production that gives the final molecule with viable yields. Pharmaceutical companies try to write patents broadly enough, or just file enough different patents, that there's no way to get to the final product without infringing one or more of their patents. The idea here is to come up with a sufficiently novel synthesis pathway that the original patents don't cover it, and thereby don't apply. Derek Lowe has a good discussion: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/automated-route-finding-and-patent-busting http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/aut...

onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>Pharmaceutical companies try to write patents broadly enough, or just file enough different patents, that there's no way to get to the final product without infringing one or more of their patents. The patent can also be thrown out if it's to broad, no? The broader it is , the better the chances that there's prior art. Sure it costs money, but then there's money to be made so someone will sue
- belorn 8y ago
  In theory yes. In practice we except the patent to be rejected by a government department which value is measured in number of granted patents, or a special court which is infamous known to favor patents over rejecting them and which previous chief Judge was himself a previous patent lawyer. The cost of getting a patent invalid is also very minor. There is no requirement to pay back the extracted rent by the time the patent get invalidated. The author also has many chances to rewrite a challenged patent and remove over broad claims. The risk vs reward of making broad claims in patents is evidentially in favor of risk.

adamzk 8y ago

I'm a patent holder for a pharmaceutically relevant class of compounds. There are two types of patents typically seen in pharma. One is procedural (how the drug is synthesized, isolated, formulated or administered) and another is composition of matter (the atoms in the molecule, their relative coordinates and the lengths and types of bonds that connect them). This program takes a target compound and does two things. 1) produces a library of similar compounds by structural diversification (making substitutions of atoms or small groups of atoms in the target compound with other atoms or groups which are known to behave similarly) with restrictions based on what has been patented under composition of matter. 2) It then takes each molecule and looks for ways it can be synthesized. It does this by breaking apart the molecule piece by piece until it obtains commercially available building blocks. These piecewise separations correspond to synthetic a steps in the other direction, which the program screens for literature precedence. It does this for every possible combination of piecewise separations until it finds a set of viable pathways from available compounds to the target. This is called retro synthesis. It then filters the potential synthetic routes for those that are covered by procedural patents until it has a list of non patented, commercially viable synthesis plans. As you can imagine there are thousands of ways a moderately complex molecule could be deconstructed and the bank of known reactions is more than any one person can really grasp. That and the myriad patent literature and how cryptic and dense it can be make the problem particularly suited for algorithmic treatment. This is only being done now because cataloging all the research and patent literature (which goes back to the late 1800s) and digitally formatting in a way that allows it to be computationally analyzed and processed requires manual translation of each report by a human being. Not many people have the expertise required for this and those that do usually prefer less menial work. So it has taken this long to amass a digital library of sufficient size to give one confidence that the answers it provides are comprehensive and that further searching would be pointless.

yholio 8y ago
> The research team hope that their software could help pharmaceutical companies in the protection of their intellectual property, and to hasten research into organic chemistry. It seems what they are attempting to sell is a IP protection service: let us show you other molecules and synesis routes you should also patent defensively, without actually attempting them in practice. Pretty soon you will have algorithmically defined patents. It's IP anti-science at it's worst.

Symmetry 8y ago

>The very word "patent" means "open". I was really surprised by that. So when Elizabeth I sold a patent for the monopoly of salt to some duke in order to raise gold for the crown the word "patent" meant that it was a public rather than a secret decree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_patent