Could Ebola vaccine delay be due to an intellectual property spat?
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
My brother did physics research through college, and was published in a prestigious journal by the time he graduated. He took his Ivy-league physics degree to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab. And if you decry patents, you remove one of the few ways it is possible for researchers to get rich from their work. And just drive more people away from the field.
I'm generally not a "greed is good" kind of guy. But as long as we live in a society where making a lot of money gives you every societal advantage, from better education for your kids to better healthcare, we can't avoid thinking about the incentive structures we create.
Kill the profit motive and you'll kill (most, not all) of the innovative new drugs.
It would be irrelevant that pharma companies benefit more from perpetual treatment if public research was a more effective balance against that. If pharma doesn't pursue a cure, and a cure is conceivable, then it would behoove academics to pursue it (as the acclaim, and hopefully financial incentive they'd receive would easily motivate them). However, due to the competition for public funding, people are less likely to go down an expensive and time consuming path like that. They're much more likely to pursue incremental discoveries that lead to continued funding rather than bet the farm on a longshot.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that there simply isn't enough science funding.
Unfortunately, there is another side of this coin-- mental health. I believe that currently the problem with the profit motive which you identified is actively harming further research and development of effective cures. Cynically, the biotech companies want to make money, and psychopharmaceuticals are the ultimate cash cow as things are currently. A diagnosis of depression or ADHD means that they have a life-long customer. Thus, in order to maintain these customers buying the drugs at high prices, they must re-invent their cash cow drugs with minor changes in time with the patent cycle. There is no incentive to develop a cure, specifically because the system can be gamed in a very profitable way by rolling over patents and offering bandaid solutions.
Says something about priorities, I guess.
Pork barrel spending based on how many congressional districts the contractor can parcel out work to, irrespective of whether there is a need for the thing being purchased, or whether it cost-effectively meets the need, or whether there's even any realistic chance that the thing being purchased will ever have any practical application?
Of course not. The alternative is to make the research a public-supported effort. We can hire more scientists with the same amount of money since it isn't being lost to executives or shareholders. Second, all of their information would be open source, which would accelerate advances. Third, drugs don't have to be prioritized by what makes sense from a monetary standpoint and instead can be prioritized from a health standpoint.
The total spend by pharma and biotech? The best number I could find is from PhRMA (a group of the largest pharma companies, but not all of them) and they spend $49B.
He took his Ivy-league physics PhD to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab.
Probably the right choice. I doubt he'll miss out any Nobel Prizes as a result.
You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.
We already devote a massive amount of funding to foreign aid -- about $48 billion in economic and military assistance in 2012 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid). We sent about $13 billion to Afghanistan and Pakistan alone in 2012, according to nationalpriorities.org. This is a pretty good match for private-sector pharmaceutical R&D expenditures, about $51 billion in 2013 according to one industry lobbyist (www.phrma.org).
The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.
I doubt that more patents make it directly easier for researchers' salaries to increase, and increase their participation in the field.
A lot of drugs these days seem to be sold as consumer products anyway, from what I see on television (“Ask your doctor if Newdrugplexastin is for you. Side effect might include death.”) Perhaps encouraging companies to redirect some of those costs to hiring better researchers could be the solution?
Here's a solution which doesn't disrupt the good aspects of the status quo: get the government and grant-giving entities to provide more money (read: 65-140k instead of 18-50k) specifically for researcher salaries.
That way, research that is created via public money is still completely open to the public and other researchers, and there isn't an incentive to leave research in order to make more money by leaving. The private sector can still try to poach academics with higher salaries, but now they'll have a harder time.
The alternative is a continuation down the current path of patent trolling and progress-halting intellectual property law. When you're blocked from making progress on an idea for many years because someone else thought of it first, there are real consequences... namely that a lot of the important fleshing-out of an initial idea isn't subjected to any kind of rigorous external criticism and refinement. It creates weird gaps where ideas that have been around for a long time are only recently free to explore, leading to realizations of potential past-applications lost.
Scientific progress is a network of nodes which moves forward through the dimensions of sophistication and time based on how many connections there are between nodes; enough blocked connections leads to big slowdowns across an entire field. For this reason, I am against intellectual property.
I wouldn't mind if we decided to start funding researchers on the public dime, full-time, but they had better do a damned sight better in terms of professionalism and communication and openness.
Also, the entire journal structure needs to be burned to the fucking ground.
I'd like it if the non-financial aspects of the journal structure remained the same, so as to group ideas/editorial groups/communities together, preserving the unique character of each journal and allowing people producing papers to target their submissions accurately. Freeness and openness of the information contained within is a must, though-- proprietary journal information is a racket which helps nobody.
Obviously, if you got rid of patents, there is a question of funding, but I don't really think the laboratories can tell where the dollars came from to keep them going, they just need enough of them to function, so presumably there are other methods that would work to keep the funding levels up.
That is $26.4 billion of tax money not going to NiH, nor would tax funded universities spend their budget on medical research. Medical research would no longer be considered tax-deductible, so fewer donation based systems.
Now let's ask how much would the current level of medical research decrease, and which areas of medical treatments would suffer the most. My guess, based on statistics that NiH published, is that research for curing life-threatening conditions (like Ebola) would grind to a halt, together with fundamental medical research. In the longer term, the lack of common research would slowly drive the collective research to a halt, basically killing the industry as it is.
If patents are carrots, government money is the base nourishment for the medical research industry. That makes carrots the optional part, not the necessary part.
I suspect your argument is pointless. I suspect you are focusing on lottery winners.
There is a huge blind spot on HN as to how other sectors of the engineering world work. If you're in wireless, you can't found a startup that directly targets consumers. If your innovation is a better power amplifier or more efficient transmission power control mechanism, your best bet is to start a company to develop the IP, and use that to get acquired by Qualcomm or Intel. And your alternative is to work for a big corp where all the fruits of your R&D efforts will go to passive shareholders. Or I suppose to work at a government R&D lab, where some private company will swoop in and take all the money once you've done the hard work.
I know lots and lots of people who have patents. Some of them have many patents. I know exactly zero people who have gotten rich off of their patents. I know a few people who have gotten bonuses for their patents. But nothing that would even buy a decent car. And these people are anything from independent practitioners to employees at large companies whose products you use every day.
Convince me that this is more than a mere anecdotes about lottery winners.
I think the answer is to figure how to stop people from getting rich off advertising and consumer products (and wall-street speculative manipulation of financial instruments).
More realistically, the answer is to make sure that science is well-funded and scientists get great pay without tying that to adding artificial restrictions to their results.
Now that we know what we're talking about, let's have a coolheaded discussion about pharmaceutical patents and only pharmaceutical patents, without comparing them to any other irrelevant law. In particular let's question the situation of the Canadian Crown being able to hold patents.
The US pay about 10-30% more for drugs than the US. If the US was paying EU prices, it would reduce the total healthcare expenditure by 1-2%?
Right now the US spends almost 50% more than other OECD countries.
I don't agree that new drug production would stay the same without patents. Why would a drug company spend $100M-$1B to make a new drug, when the next company can start selling it for $0.10 per pill?
"In particular, Boldrin and Levine devote a chapter of their book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, to the pharmaceutical industry. They argue that the actual cost of bringing drugs to market is substantially lower than the estimates produced by the pharmaceutical industry — a group with a vested interest in lobbying for strong patent protections. They also provide evidence that in many instances the existence of patents hinders research in drug production."
[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/africa/2014/09/ebola-vaccine-test...
Anyone who thinks that a vaccine that you pay for is better than no vaccine.