4 ms·

You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all

• shimman 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • krainboltgreene 3mo ago
    I do however like the imagery from the parent of a big collection of people working for a decade to produce one (1) drug and then burning all that infrastructure and training down and then being shocked when someone with no infrastructure or training or history in drugs comes along and somehow produces it but outsells the original.
  • temporalparts 3mo ago
    This may surprise extreme altruists but there are people who genuinely care about profit motives and are only willing to make the world a better place at a price. I don't see software engineers in advertising and finance quitting their jobs en-masse to work for teach for america, doctors without borders, etc. Also, the bulk of the cost of manufacturing a drug lives in the scientific & engineering exploration space, which we should incentivize.
  • clickety_clack 3mo ago
    This may surprise socialists, but you can set up a pharma company yourself right now that makes all its research open.
  • koolba 3mo ago
    Some will surely exist. We already have public funding for things that are not particularly profitable. The question is if it will net a better system overall. Even with the current system everything older than X years is public. That means we should have better care options available then anything X years ago. And that keeps increasing.
  • overgard 3mo ago
    I agree, but man, getting the money to make the world a better place goes through the capitalists right now so unfortunately that's the game. Can't fix the problem without fixing the system. (I'm not like hardcore marxist or anything, but incentives shape everything; have to fix the incentives)
  • ClarityJones 3mo ago
    People talk about capitalism as if there is a choice; as if Gravity might not pull us towards earth.
    • Ajedi32 3mo ago
      I'd quibble with that. Capitalism is a choice, market dynamics are not. E.g. The Soviet Union successfully outlawed capitalism, and in response market dynamics made their country collapse.
      • paulryanrogers 3mo ago
        Unregulated market dynamics also gave us child labor, slave trade, 12h work days, company scrip, companies ruling over governments, etc. A powerful engine without constraints is out of control.
        • ClarityJones 3mo ago
          England imposed the institution of slavery on the American colonies by means of their regulation of economic affairs. It didn't occur spontaneously from market dynamics, but was specifically provided for by (their) laws.
          • paulryanrogers 3mo ago
            I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The slave trade existed as an institution for economic reasons, and for thousands of years before England was a nation. If it were unprofitable then people would've stopped doing it, regardless of how it started. It wasn't just some government flex. You also haven't addressed any of the other negatives that unregulated market dynamics have manifested.
          • wqaatwt 3mo ago
            I’m pretty sure the colonists imposed it themselves because it benefited them. England didn’t force them to buy and exploit slaves.
  • svara 3mo ago
    It's not black and white- in pharma there are notable sources for investment that are not private, e.g. for orphan diseases that would otherwise not see enough investment due to lack of profitability. But here's a mechanism to mobilize private capital for those diseases that are. Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug. You're asking someone to pay that money and allowing others to reap the rewards. Why wouldn't everyone want to be the one who didn't pay the money?
    • markdown 3mo ago
      > Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug. These are made up numbers though. 99% of that is overheads of a massive corporation. A tiny fraction of 10B would pay for all the brightest minds in teh world for a decade. Another tiny fraction to pay for a lab and lab techs.
• thinkingtoilet 3mo ago
  > Why would anyone invest in drug studies? To make a shit ton of money. These things are insanely profitable. Generics exist and they're still profitable. You can get 99% of drugs from over seas and they're still profitable. These companies make trillions of dollars over the years. Yes, they might make slightly less money, but they still would be making a shit ton of money.
  • svara 3mo ago
    Generics exist for drugs that usually someone did hold a patent for that has since expired and they're much less profitable than patented drugs. Not sure how that address the point. Again, the investment to get a drug to market is gigantic and you're saying that someone should pay for that and someone else should get the reward. It really doesn't work that way. Everyone would want to be the one who didn't pay.
  • ajam1507 3mo ago
    Who is going to invest in your company when they could invest in the company that just makes the drugs you invent without the overhead of R&D?
  • wqaatwt 3mo ago
    And why would you manufacture anything but generics?
    • thinkingtoilet 3mo ago
      To make a shit ton of money.
      • wqaatwt 3mo ago
        How? you would make more money by only manufacturing generic drugs. Investing massive amounts of money to subsidize your competitors would be irrational.
• Buttons840 3mo ago
  > You spend billions The you being taxpayers, right?
  • svara 3mo ago
    No, only a small part of this is publicly funded.
    • paulryanrogers 3mo ago
      Which part is small? Productizing? R&D? Marketing?
    • kingkawn 3mo ago
      Nearly all basic science research is publicly funded, then in the US transferred to the private sector for commercial exploitation
      • derektank 3mo ago
        Phase 1/2/3 clinical trials (the kinds of studies that cost tens of millions of dollars) are overwhelmingly funded by private industry.
• alzamos 3mo ago
  The book goes into quite a bit of depth if it is a topic that interests you. I would flag that we’re getting into “prove a negative” territory here: the goalpost is that we need to prove empirically that patents achieve the desired outcome. If the scenario you describe accounts for all game-theory/incentive/complex-adaptive-system universes, we should see this reflected in the data. When it comes to pharmaceuticals, they looked into Italy and Switzerland who switched to a patent system in 1978 (and I believe Portugal in the 1990s). They looked at the growth curves of things like # of inventions, total factor productivity, percentage R&D spending, and the conclusion was that there was no statistically significant change in trajectory that would suggest the introduction of the patents had any positive effects. (Edit: they accounted for domestic/international + US filings before/after as well).
  • svara 3mo ago
    Thanks for actually giving a great answer to this versus the other knee-jerk comments! I will definitely look into this more. I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.
    • alzamos 3mo ago
      Of course! Happy you found it useful. You’ll have to forgive me if my answer isn’t super satisfying - it’s possible, but I’d want to see patents under these conditions empirically validated. Some things you might find interesting - the author(s) make various arguments such as: 1) Ranking (by various metrics/criteria) the most impactful medicines and making the case that the ones developed independently from patents are both over represented and more impactful. (There was some stuff around what kind of medicines are incentivised with each regime) 2) I don’t exactly remember what they say about R&D costs increasing with time (aside from (1)-style skepticism), but they did talk how as time went on, logistics/distribution/marketing technology has grown immeasurably, so the window one has before the copycats come in can be exploited with a lot more gusto. 3) Reverse engineering of medicines + especially their industrialisation takes longer (and requires more capital) than people think, and there’s a bit of a conundrum where, because you don’t know which medicines will be commercially successful, you have to wait to see how they perform on the market… but the longer you wait, the more (2) happens (and the more you have to fight first mover advantage, established marketing etc) The points are more rigorously covered in the book - (2)+(3) had papers that quantified the stated effects in question. I will stress again though that while the “counter-narratives” are interesting and may help build some intuition, I would set the gold standard to some econometric/shock-analysis of patents in action.