3 ms·

Re drug development: Why should they get an exception? This is how we create a flawed system. There are lots of things in the markets with high entry costs that

Re drug development: Why should they get an exception? This is how we create a flawed system. There are lots of things in the markets with high entry costs that's part of the challenge to bringing a product to market. You still get a huge market share/reputation and likely can keep that by being the first to market which is enough reward imo to a product to market. If the public did subsidize any ip then that ip should be disimenated after the subsidy period to the public.

creato 6y ago
I think the thing that is unique about drugs is that they are incredibly expensive to develop and bring to market, but trivially cheap to reproduce. I just happened to watch this video [1] a few days ago, where the host gets, as a free sample, enough of a chemical to make $3 million at retail prices worth of a cancer drug. That doesn't seem to be true of anything else covered by patents. Software is cheap to develop, and other kinds of engineered products (cars, hardware, etc.) usually aren't that much cheaper to reproduce than they are to develop. I think patents should simply be far more expensive. For a drug (or a chip manufacturer or whatever), even a very expensive patent would be negligible relative to the R&D costs. However, it would make a lot of bullshit patents not worth getting. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Expensive patents would price out hard tech startups
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  Patents are already expensive enough to stifle innovation and even more expensive to enforce. This is already happening when they aren't artificially raised because of inherent costs in our legal system. I think modern drug manufacturing is a lot more nuanced then oh I can copy this chemical. And if it is then that's life of a drug manufacturer, you build that into the price. Like everybody else, I think it's a false political narrative that drugs are magically nuanced in ways other things aren't.
chadash 6y ago
> Re drug development: Why should they get an exception? Because we've decided that drugs need to be safe and effective to get approval. And the process for proving that a drug is safe and effective is extremely expensive. If you don't reward companies that do the R&D, there just won't be incentives for private industry to develop drugs. If company A spends $1 billion dollars to develop a new compound and then run clinical trials to prove it's safety, and then company B comes along and manufacturers the same drug but says "it's already been tested on patients by company B, so we shouldn't have to bear any of that cost again, but just the cost of manufacturing the drug itself which is trivial" then you'll have a lot of company Bs but no company As. That said, maybe patents aren't the right mechanism for this. Maybe just extend the term on existing exclusivity to something similar to the term that patents cover. > You still get a huge market share/reputation and likely can keep that by being the first to market which is enough reward imo to a product to market. The data doesn't bear this out. When drugs go generic, the brand drugs' market share overwhelmingly drops in favor of people who buy the generic (insurance companies usually force you to by not paying for the brand). There are exceptions for certain types of drugs.

creato 6y ago

I think the thing that is unique about drugs is that they are incredibly expensive to develop and bring to market, but trivially cheap to reproduce. I just happened to watch this video [1] a few days ago, where the host gets, as a free sample, enough of a chemical to make $3 million at retail prices worth of a cancer drug. That doesn't seem to be true of anything else covered by patents. Software is cheap to develop, and other kinds of engineered products (cars, hardware, etc.) usually aren't that much cheaper to reproduce than they are to develop. I think patents should simply be far more expensive. For a drug (or a chip manufacturer or whatever), even a very expensive patent would be negligible relative to the R&D costs. However, it would make a lot of bullshit patents not worth getting. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XGfnmTm8E

gentleman11 6y ago
Expensive patents would price out hard tech startups
defnotashton2 6y ago
Patents are already expensive enough to stifle innovation and even more expensive to enforce. This is already happening when they aren't artificially raised because of inherent costs in our legal system. I think modern drug manufacturing is a lot more nuanced then oh I can copy this chemical. And if it is then that's life of a drug manufacturer, you build that into the price. Like everybody else, I think it's a false political narrative that drugs are magically nuanced in ways other things aren't.

chadash 6y ago

> Re drug development: Why should they get an exception? Because we've decided that drugs need to be safe and effective to get approval. And the process for proving that a drug is safe and effective is extremely expensive. If you don't reward companies that do the R&D, there just won't be incentives for private industry to develop drugs. If company A spends $1 billion dollars to develop a new compound and then run clinical trials to prove it's safety, and then company B comes along and manufacturers the same drug but says "it's already been tested on patients by company B, so we shouldn't have to bear any of that cost again, but just the cost of manufacturing the drug itself which is trivial" then you'll have a lot of company Bs but no company As. That said, maybe patents aren't the right mechanism for this. Maybe just extend the term on existing exclusivity to something similar to the term that patents cover. > You still get a huge market share/reputation and likely can keep that by being the first to market which is enough reward imo to a product to market. The data doesn't bear this out. When drugs go generic, the brand drugs' market share overwhelmingly drops in favor of people who buy the generic (insurance companies usually force you to by not paying for the brand). There are exceptions for certain types of drugs.