4 ms·
It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the
by tverbeure 3y ago
It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years.
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
- mjburgess 3y agoI think you're overgenealising a bit here. There are significant incentives on the pharam company to get it right, but they didnt. In a sense, life happens -- it seems this is an accident. Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives. ie., the "Accident" is the norm
- noobermin 3y agoIs there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y agoIt would be a shame if the formula were to "leak" accidentally, resulting in commercialization taking place in another country with looser IP laws, and saving thousands of people's lives in the process.
- water-data-dude 3y agoI think that what they’re saying is that no one would pay for the expensive trials and approval process, since they wouldn’t have enough time to make their money back from it. So even if it were leaked, it still wouldn’t get produced.
- wolf550e 3y agoThere is a patent, the formula is not secret. Someone needs to pay for the work to get it approved by the FDA.
- tverbeure 3y agoI thought that the formula was not secret, but that's actually not the case: apparently, patents like this are written so that they cover a whole class of molecules without specifying exactly which one, or something of that sort. (I forgot the details.)
- josephcsible 3y agoWhy is it legal for patents to be like that? Wasn't the premise of them supposed to be "we'll fully disclose the details of this thing in exchange for a temporary monopoly on making it"?
- tverbeure 3y agoIt was given back to the original developer. But nobody is willing to invest in getting it to market. This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.
- Fomite 3y agoThis is often a clause in our commercialization agreements - that if a company sits on it, the license reverts back to us.
- waterheater 3y agoOn this subject, I recommend the book "Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics?" by Evelleen Richards. Pharmaceutical companies have no intrinsic motivation to provide (1) cures at (2) a price one could purchase without health insurance.
- caddemon 3y agoBiomedical sciences are pretty bad in general. There are truly tough problems but I also think that industry is way too intertwined with academia right now, which causes cascading effects and perhaps parts of the cultural rot to spread. Obviously the economic incentives/legal concerns you've described are a different story, but the initial mistake you've mentioned that enabled the whole scenario I'm guessing is part of a larger pattern with the quality of pharma research.