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Comment by doesnotexist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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