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Comment by _edo | Hacker News Reader

Governmental regulations (safety, etc.) make the cost of developing a new drug extraordinary. Without exclusive patents on the back end companies won't have a reason to foot the bill on the front end.

Even without regulations developing and testing a new drug wouldn't be economical if somebody else could steal your formula the moment you figure out that it works.

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This dynamic already exists in diagnostics. There's a huge second mover advantage in diagnostics because it's relatively hard to patent a diagnostic effectively. I know a few people in diagnostic companies that have very much soured on the industry as a result.

Yep. These realities exist in so many other industries too. Entire businesses are setup as fast followers.

It turns out that most of these new drugs have done more harm than good. See Purdue, for example. With very few exceptions, new drugs != better health. Our healthcare industry is a disaster and intellectual monopoly laws are a big reason why. We need to ditch those and focus on good outcomes, which does not mean focusing on giving vast rewards to some novelty regardless of efficacy.

Purdue's new delivery mechanisms were actually a huge benefit to the right patients. The problem is they abused it and actively sold the drug to the wrong patients repeatedly and worked hard to push back oversight.

The problem was you could make unnatural "lottery-winnings" money selling OxyContin, and people respond to incentives. Ditch the incentives for selling novelties and the boring businesses focused on the actual health outcomes of the patient will thrive.

If a new drug isn't useful it doesn't matter if the manufacturer has exclusive rights to it.

If people are buying/being prescribed drugs that don't improve their health that's a different problem that won't be solved by changing intellectual property law.

The problem is it does in practice. Almost all of the profitable drugs turn out to be useless (often harmful actually). I agree there is another problem here: medical science is laughable bad (and that’s a problem of tooling and poor data science tools, which I work on), as the combinatorics are much larger than our tools are currently capable of handling. But in the meantime, while people are still allowed to pitch junk science as fact, and medical decisions are based on junk science, the least we can do is stop rewarding monopoly profits to drugs with scant real evidence of support.

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