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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Of course the flip side is that if a drug is not patentable then research stops. More effective drugs are replaced with slightly modified, possibly less effective or more dangerous, and definitely shorter track record drugs just to preserve profit margins. If natural compounds are more effective in treating some condition, today's pharmaceutical industry will do all they can to avoid discovering that.

Sure drugs are expensive to development, but I'm not sure that the twisted system of incentives is beneficial overall. Of course the industry will claim that none of this research would happen without patents, but of course they are set up that way and can't imagine it any other way. I doubt that humanity as a whole would simply stop advanced medical research because the economics changed.

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This is nonsense. Even for "natural compounds", phase 3 clinical trials are necessary to prove efficacy. These trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody is going to put up that kind of money unless there's profit in it, period.

Oh yeah, also: most phase 3 trials fail.

>Nobody is going to put up that kind of money unless there's profit in it, period.

I don't know what kind of fantasy world you are living in but there are plenty of governments and charities who fund scientific and medical research without the goal of profit.

The research is inexpensive, the development is not. Having the government do the inexpensive part -- the research -- does not eliminate the extremely expensive development. Almost all the cost of new pharmaceuticals is in the development phase. Government funding research is a drop in the bucket after private companies fund the clinical trials.

While government has an okay track record funding research, they have a pretty poor track record funding development, hence why it is left to private companies. This has to do with the way governments legally structure funding combined with the fact that development cycles are much longer than political cycles. In areas where the government does fund development, the development is interrupted by constantly shifting funding priorities and politicians trying to redirect money to their districts or constituents in the middle of development. This tends to make things cost (at least) twice as much and take (at least) twice as long as they would in environments where the development cycle is guaranteed to be uninterrupted and free from the whims of whoever is elected this year.

Sure they fund research, but how many of these governments and charities actually work on the final end product.

The research they are doing is generally not in the final phase of actual development of the drug which is where it gets incredibly expensive.

I don't know.

The interesting thing is that, from: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070927/012604.shtml

>A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).

In other words, government funded or not, patents are stifling medical innovation.

> I doubt that humanity as a whole would simply stop advanced medical research because the economics changed.

It wouldn't stop but it would definitely decrease significantly. The fact is that many countries are implementing carbon tax/ETS specifically to make the economics more favourable to renewable research and development. So economics matters.

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