Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

This article does a good job showing how big an impact the concept of "time value of money" can have on a multi-year investment of any kind - pharmaceutical or not. (Particularly since many of us in software are effectively investing nontrivial amounts of our salary in illiquid investments.)

I'd imagine that many tend to think of a $X investment as a $X investment... but if that investor could get effectively compounded interest/returns, even at a single-digit rate, in another investment, they could be risking many times $X by forgoing that investment to take the one in question. Take a look at the chart and formulas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow . Important stuff to know regardless of how large a financial decision one wants to make.

And in the context of highly risky drug development, in a capitalist society it's a miracle that niche drugs are researched at all. It speaks to the passion of scientists like the author who endeavor constantly to develop tooling and processes to accelerate/de-risk drug research enough to be an attractive investment in today's increasingly optimized society.

The more I learn about finance, and the better I grok money, the more I start to think of money as a substance that represents time-travel, in a sense. Current amount of money you have on your account is always tied up to your past decisions or to a space of your possible decisions about it, and so well-quantified, that the worth of basically anything is always tied up to a dynamic process which is always, in the end, measured in time.

(OK, I just understood that what I wrote reads as a horrible unintelligible mess, but I didn't yet grok this idea well enough to put it down elegantly.)

In certain ways the entire concept of retirement saving is an investment in the ability to time travel later in life!

Also a bet that you will live to later. I've known a few people who died young: on hindsight they should have lived life better and not saved so much (I have no idea how much they saved, but even 1 penny in their pocket...)

I agree completely, most people overlook the "opportunity cost" of investments. If an investment makes %3 per year but you could invest in something else that makes %4 per year, while you did make profit, you actually lost money, because you missed an opportunity to make an extra revenue equals to %1 of your money (or %33 more profit).

Or more common, knowing how to balance a smaller payout now vs. a larger payout in the future. If you are investing, the smaller payout might be the more valuable option. Of course most people don't invest, which is why future discount isn't widely understood.

You see people do this a lot with housing. They make $100k after 5 years and pat themselves on the back.

They ignore that if they had put their down payment in the market, they would have made $110k.

The difference is that they can buy homes on margin, whereas no one would lend to them to invest in the market on margin. Return has to account for only putting 5% to 20% down. Not that I think homes are a good investment outside of the few burgeoning cities in the US, compared to index funds, time/labor costs included.

They must be a shockingly good investment in my city from all the junk mail I get advertising shared equity contracts.

Most equities are already leveraged.

My comment ignores the leverage and just looks at the downpayment alone.

To your point, their $100k gain at 5x leverage kind sucks compared to a $110k gain at zero leverage.

You also see this kind of argument against housing a lot, which also ignores that housing is one of the few highly leveraged investments an individual can/will make, and that even if you don't buy a house you will have to pay for housing, all of which goes to someone else's pocket.

Your summary is missing a critical factor: you probably need somewhere to live. Let's simplify that to the binary choice of rent or buy, so now your decision is: what is the risks and rewards for my "portfolio" after X years renting versus after X years buying.

For your incomplete example, if the summed cost of rentals was $10k higher than cost of owning the home, then they made a profit.

This is nicely stated. There is much wrong with the pharmaceutical industry including pay-to-delay generics, and abusive pricing non-innovative drugs, and that needs too be fixed. Maybe more importantly, effectively communicating the costs and risks of drug development has, and the magnitude of the impact of successful drugs have on the improvement of health care is something the industry has done poorly.

There is much wrong with the pharmaceutical industry including pay-to-delay generic

I disagree on this one.

Pay-to-delay is just the branded drug manufacturer and the generic company splitting the difference through negotiation. What you end up with something in-between the two potential outcomes.

Situation: branded drug has 2 more years of patent life, but generic company wants to challenge it; neither party is sure they will prevail.

Outcome 1: patent holds and branded manufacturer gets entire market for two years/generic company loses money on legal fees

Outcome 2: patent holder loses patent and money on legal fees/generic company gets entire market for two years (yes, typically this doesn't happen, trying to simplify)

Instead of each party going to court and paying a ton in legal fees with an uncertain outcome, the pay-for-delay is splitting the difference. The branded manufacturer pays the generic company $X to delay entry until year 1. Everybody gets something from the deal.

They call it "pay-to-delay", but that ignores outcome #1, where the generic is delayed for an even longer period.

> Everybody gets something from the deal

Everyone except the patient, who continues to pay the exclusivity premium but would (assuming option 2) have paid less.

But you don't know option 2 would have been the outcome. Rather than both companies duking it out in court for a few years, the patient benefits when the generic entry happens quicker than if the patent held.

I guess the concern is that paying a company not to challenge the patent(and start the 6 month clock if the patent is lost) is anti-competitive and collusive.

I can see how that could be the perception. However, if the generic company is certain they could successfully challenge the patent, they'd never enter into such an agreement because there is a far higher payoff to move forward with the patent challenge.

It's the gray area cases that end up in pay for delay deals. The ones that neither party is sure they will win. So they cut their loses and negotiate middle ground where each of them get a piece of the pie.

That depends entirely on how much they are paid to delay. A successful pay to delay settlement can be more profitable for the generic than entering the market. That is to say, it is more profitable to share revenue from a monopoly than race to the bottom.

A classic example is GSK and TEVA with Lamictal. GSK priced the original drug at $465/dose with $1.5 billion in sales. Teva's Generic was $14/dose. TEVA happily agreed to be paid by GSK because if TEVA had won in court, entered the market, and captured 100%, they would only bring in 50 million a year

https://www.fiercepharma.com/regulatory/more-scotus-fallout-...

Do you have another source? The one you shared is light on details.

I'm not sure why TEVA would price at $14/dose at launch - most exclusive generics price at ~95% of the branded therapy, then drop once other generic entries happen. If the TEVA generic were to capture 50% of the market over 6 months, that's $600M+ in revenue, not $50M.

If the patent is invalidated, then what provides the generic company with exclusivity for two years-- I thought the regulatory exclusivity provided to first-in generics was only 6 months?

It was just an example. You are correct that the first generic entry gets just 6 months of exclusivity.

I'm not at all an expert on generics, but the company suing to remove exclusivity has almost certainly done some groundwork needed to produce the generic drug. They likely need to figure out how to produce the drug as well as some business stuff like market determination, so a second generic manufacturer is probably a bit behind.

for significant small molecule drugs, there is commonly a cohort of generic firms ready at expiry. There is usually little barrier to entry beyond the patent or regulatory exclusivities. Prices are typically crushed after the 6 months. Biologics (antibodies/ vaccines) are a different story because of the complexity of their manufacturing and characterization.

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