3 ms·
As a biochemist, I can assure you that if pharma-patents went away, drug-development would disappear overnight. One can argue over the specifics, but some form
by roadnottaken 16y ago
As a biochemist, I can assure you that if pharma-patents went away, drug-development would disappear overnight. One can argue over the specifics, but some form of IP protection is necessary in that arena.
- tgflynn 16y agoMy understanding of the traditional drug development model is basically that companies spend millions of dollars testing large numbers of substances in vitro, then in animals then finally in human trials to find a very small number of drugs that work. Once such a drug has been found and approved by the FDA it is fairly trivial for a competitor to reproduce, which in the absence of patents, would allow the competitor to essentially appropriate all the R&D the initial developer did. This development model is extremely different from that seen in software and related technologies where many small ideas are combined to form compelling technological solutions. I suspect this difference in development models is the main reason for the much slower (linear) progress seen in medicine compared to information technologies (exponential). I also suspect that as our understanding of biological systems improves, the pharmaceutical industry will evolve towards a more information based development model. In any case, it seems to me that in the present, IP policy needs to accept that different industries have different development models and that a one size fits all IP policy is not a good solution.