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Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

At least if they'd kept their findings secret, researchers could independently be researching the same thing.

Now independent researchers won't want to touch lugdunin because they'll need to license the patent, however they won't know whether licensing the patent is worthwhile until they do their research. This will prevent further research, not encourage it.

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As someone who used to work in drug development, I disagree.

Patents don't prevent compounds from being explored in research. If this is anything like other discoveries, companies will start looking at lugdunin very closely.

What is it's mechanism of action? Can the structure be optimized? What else could it be used for?

Other antibiotics have been patented and that didn't stop companies from doing the research and tweaking the structure to make it even better.

> What is its mechanism of action?

From this image of the structure (http://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/94/31/09431-notw4-Lugduni...) it looks very much like some kind of small pore. That's a total guess, of course, but a cyclic peptide with alternating chirality looks reasonable, although a little small at only 7 residues.

Worse, other commercial researches will be wasting their time with busywork to find a non-patented analog which they can claim for themselves, instead of working on new things.

Why is finding a non-patented analog a bad thing? A lot of our medical discoveries are incremental advancements brought about work on analogs.

Maybe a company will find a new mechanism of action when they look at analogs? Maybe a less toxic version? Maybe the lead compound fails but the backups work?

That's not actually a bad thing. The first signs of resistance occur on average 1~2 years after introduction of a novel abx; the search for variants helps to extend the usable life of a new family of antibiotics.

Are you sure about that? I would think that the patent wouldn't apply to non-commercial investigations or research. That is you would be free to synthesize or extract this chemical in a laboratory environment. However, if you wished to manufacture the drug for commercial purposes then you would need to license the patent.

Well, potential researchers will also have to weigh the possibility that they spend all of the time and effort to research other possibilities for it only to find out that after all of the licensing fees, etc they won't even be able to break even on the fruits of their research.

It carries too high of a risk for financially-minded people (looking for a return on investment) to throw money at it.

>It carries too high of a risk for financially-minded people (looking for a return on investment) to throw money at it.

As opposed to the risk of searching for some completely new thing that may not exist?

" I would think that the patent wouldn't apply to non-commercial investigations or research. "

The exception, at least in US law, is super-super slim

You're right that it won't apply for non-commercial investigations. But how are you funding the investigation? It's typically funded by the proceeds generated from the research. Research is always hit and miss as to profitability, more miss than hit. Factor in potentially unknown licensing arrangements, even if you do have a "hit", and suddenly your research doesn't look like such a good idea.

> It's typically funded by the proceeds generated from the research.

That's only true in the case of commercial R&D. For non-commercial (academic) research, the funding is normally through a grant mechanism (not company supported). Academic research is almost never concerned with the licensing/patent issues aside from "can I run my experiment". It is common for academic labs to use drugs that are still "in the pipeline" for experiments.

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