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End all patents except for medicine? Why does medicine get a free pass? There are just as many people gunning for pharmaceutical patent reform as there are gun

End all patents except for medicine? Why does medicine get a free pass? There are just as many people gunning for pharmaceutical patent reform as there are gunning for software patent reform. The whole system needs to be revisited.

kenjackson 15y ago
Because I actually think innovation would dry up in medicine without patents. The reason being that it takes a lot of time and money to bring a new drug to market. Hundreds of millions in many cases. And the cost to create a generic version is very low. Think tens of thousands. And the time even lower (think weeks). So you have a situation where you can spend $300M over 5 years to create a new drug (due to various regulations in bringing a drug to market), which will have generic competition in two months after release. That makes doing that type of drug research a non-starter. It's not like the drug maker can just keep improving the drug. That doesn't happen in most other industries, where your 1 year of research and development largely gives you a 3-6 month advantage (you can release whatever you want, whenever you want). And you can then continue to improve the product at a brisk rate, building on what you've done. Google today is not the Google from a decade ago. They've taken their technology and improved it at a rapid rate, such that the current product is magnitudes better. You can't do that for most drugs.
- dalke 15y ago
  There are other business models which support innovation. One that comes up in this sort of discussion is that Cuba has a government-funded drug research program, and with a focus on tropical diseases. The US/Western Europe/Japanese pharmaceutical research doesn't have a focus on that area in part because there's less profit, and in part because it's hard. (Interestingly, the US military funds research in the field since we don't want deployed soldiers dying of disease.) I, however, don't know enough about alternative business models to say if they make any sense.

kenjackson 15y ago

Because I actually think innovation would dry up in medicine without patents. The reason being that it takes a lot of time and money to bring a new drug to market. Hundreds of millions in many cases. And the cost to create a generic version is very low. Think tens of thousands. And the time even lower (think weeks). So you have a situation where you can spend $300M over 5 years to create a new drug (due to various regulations in bringing a drug to market), which will have generic competition in two months after release. That makes doing that type of drug research a non-starter. It's not like the drug maker can just keep improving the drug. That doesn't happen in most other industries, where your 1 year of research and development largely gives you a 3-6 month advantage (you can release whatever you want, whenever you want). And you can then continue to improve the product at a brisk rate, building on what you've done. Google today is not the Google from a decade ago. They've taken their technology and improved it at a rapid rate, such that the current product is magnitudes better. You can't do that for most drugs.

dalke 15y ago
There are other business models which support innovation. One that comes up in this sort of discussion is that Cuba has a government-funded drug research program, and with a focus on tropical diseases. The US/Western Europe/Japanese pharmaceutical research doesn't have a focus on that area in part because there's less profit, and in part because it's hard. (Interestingly, the US military funds research in the field since we don't want deployed soldiers dying of disease.) I, however, don't know enough about alternative business models to say if they make any sense.