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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 12:10 AM EDT |
If it does cost that much, then the task is most efficiently
undertaken collaboratively either as a "public works" type of
arrangement or a private-public kind of effort.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Agreed - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 05:13 PM EDT
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| Authored by: mvs_tomm on Monday, May 13 2013 @ 12:38 PM EDT |
currently the only way to recoup them is
through
patents
You can sell the drug that you developed, and keep
the formula secret.
Tom Marchant [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Wednesday, May 15 2013 @ 08:54 AM EDT |
And most of those "legitimate costs" are imposed by (an overly
paranoid) government. Give a drugs company a monopoly on the drugs it discovers,
by all means. Make it an explicit payback for research expenditure if you like.
But all the evidence is that patents distort the market, be it pharma, or
software, or aything else, and that distortion is HARMFUL.
The majority of patented drugs are "retreads" or whatever the term is,
with the explicit aim of keeping the expired drugs off the market. If the
stories we hear about drug studies are to be believed, most of the cost of
safety testing is a total waste...
And the main use of many pills (like that little blue one) was only discovered
by accident - I understand penicillin is lethal to guinea pigs ...
Get rid of patents, accept that you need a mechanism to protect manufacturers in
high-risk industries like pharma, and deal with it! Indeed, probably the best
way of dealing with it is for academic money to fund blue-sky research and
initial trials, and then sell off the "research park" company (with
say a five- or ten-year monopoly) when you've got a working drug. After all,
isn't that how the system actually works in *current* practice?
If big companies want to spend loads of money on retreads, that's up to them,
but testin and licencing for a retread shouldn't be so onerous as for a new
drug.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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