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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> A cheap and widely available drug called dexamethasone can help save the lives of patients who are seriously ill with coronavirus.

Yes, cheap until it gets patented because that is what usually happens when a drug is repurposed.

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Glucocorticoids are very old drugs. If there were a new patent at this stage in the US, it would be a combination drug or delayed release oral form ([source](https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/09/patenting-repurposed-drug...). There's also a dozen alternative generic analogues. There's already a [markup](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/the-g...) for very common drugs in IV form, which is bad, but unfortunately it's a very small part of the ICU bill to begin with in the US.

Given that it was discovered in the 1950's, I don't think you're going to see a patent on the versions currently being used in clinic. Now,if someone creates a more bio-available/active functionalized variant of it, fine that might get patented. But I doubt it would have much of an impact on the suggested COVID19 treatment (and would likely be years away from market)

You can actually get patent protection on things like dosage and indications. But it's much weaker than for composition-of-matter patents and often courts rule in favor of challengers.

Using dexamethasone (an anti-inflammatory drug) to reduce inflammation is not patentable.

It would be like attempting to patent testosterone. I'm going to boldly claim that it couldn't happen. Maybe a big PR campaign could cause everyone to switch to a new version which is very expensive and has no different properties, but this drug's going nowhere.

Just let them try! ;)

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