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Comment by _craft | Hacker News Reader

The nytimes article mentions:

"The research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the German government (some co-authors work at the University of Bonn). Northeastern University holds a patent on the method of producing drugs and licensed the patent to a private company, NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Mass., which owns the rights to any compounds produced. Dr. Lewis is a paid consultant to the company."

If the research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health, why is the patent privately owned? This does not seem fair to taxpayers.

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This is not only allowed, it's encouraged by legislation called the Bayh-Dole Act. The general thought is that there would be no incentive for anyone to do clinical trials on the drug, which can get quite expensive, if they don't have some protection for exclusive use. Many, if not most drugs proceed starting from academic research funded by governmental support.

Thanks for the informative response! Do you know how expensive clinical trials would be for this kind of drug?

$100M-500M gets thrown around [1] but it's hard to find good data. This might seem not too high, but many drugs fail, and often fail at the most costly step (phase III). So you have to be sure to factor that failure rate in.

[1] http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/fda_05.htm

Depends on what indication they are trying to get. A handy estimate is that a phase III trial costs $15K/person/year. If they aim for a 1000 person trial of 6 month duration, you're looking at $15M just for the phase 3 (I doubled it since they typically run two). However, that's a small trial.

Fidaxomycin, which was developed by Optimer Pharmaceuticals to treat C. difficle, was relatively inexpensive to run. I want to say in the vicinity of $100 million

I'll also add that the educational institute who received the government funds out-licenses the drug while maintaining a royalty interest in it. Lyrica came out of Northwestern and they build a brand new, shiny chemistry building out of the royalties.

Why is that bad? Shouldn't the discoverers of pregabalin, who helped millions in excruciating incurable chronic pain, receive a portion of the profit from the sales of the drug to build facilities for future research?

That seems like a well-formed feedback loop to me.

How much of that goes to the actual researchers vs the school?

Depends on the school. The general rule of thumb is about 1/3rd to the inventors themselves, 1/3rd to the department, 1/3 to the school.

Cynically, even if the school gets 100% of the profits, the feedback loop of "encourage drug development, get paid" functions properly. They would only have to pay their researchers just enough to continue working...

The guy at Northwestern who discovered Lyrica is a multimillionaire. The incoming royalties are usually split between the researcher and school.

I'm not saying it's bad at all! I'm just pointing out that the academics who invent something and pass it to a biotech company for development get something in return!

Totally agreed. I misread your tone, which can be tough to perceive over the interwebs sometimes. My apologies :)

Do note companies have a very strong incentive to make clinical trials as expensive as possible for this, and other reasons.

Companies have a very strong incentive to make it expensive? Can you expand on that?

My naive instinct is that there should be some sort of split, not just having the university hold the full patent and income resulting from it, but I do think there should be some sweat equity for the researchers. Similar to how if you're raising money for a company, you don't have to sell your entire stake.

(This gets weird with the distinction between the researchers and the university as well, but that's a separate issue.)

Often university patent agreements are flexible, but agreements like 1/3 to research team, 1/3 to university (with some set aside for the hosting department), and 1/3 to the funding agency (depending on what's allowed by law) are not atypical.

A successful company will pay back the government many multiples of its investment in the form of corporate and income taxes. Also, financial incentives incentivize entrepreneurs to make the venture successful. Imagine the government taking over the commercialization of the drug...

The profit motive also motivates people to externalize & rationalize effects on the environment & the public at large.

No, harsh experience with Communist, socialist and Fascist regimes shows this is a universal human problem, with far worse e.g. environmental results. If you have independent companies do stuff, the government(s) they operate under, and people using the mechanisms of those governments, tend to check them. The alternatives remove those checks altogether.

Consolidating power tends to cause these sort of issues. It doesn't matter what the label of the system is, Communist, Socialist, Fascist, Capitalist.

While capitalism "won" these battles in the past and is better than authoritarianism, at the present moment, capitalism is destroying us all. Our version of capitalism is the new authoritarian regime evolving toward fascism. Like any authoritarian regime, our capitalism has effective marketing & it's believers.

"She died a famous woman denying her wounds; denying her wounds came from the same source as her power" -- Power, by Adrienne Rich (About Marie Curie)

So the answer is not as simple as sprinkling some "capitalism" on it. We need more love of self & others, more transparency, more equality, environmental protection, systemic design, awareness of the impact of our actions, awareness of politics, decentralization, less emphasis on money and more emphasis on community, etc.

"If you name me, you negate me. By giving me a name, a label, you negate all of the other things I could possibly be." -- Søren Kierkegaard.

The answer is not a label. The answer is our actions. That is who we are.

"We need more love of self & others, more transparency, more equality, environmental protection, systemic design, awareness of the impact of our actions, awareness of politics, decentralization, less emphasis on money and more emphasis on community, etc."

How do you propose to bring about a more utopian society with the above characteristics?

How plastic do you think human nature is?

(Note that I came of political age during the tail end of the cultural '60s. I have heard all of the above before....)

> How do you propose to bring about a more utopian society with the above characteristics?

Individual people have to care about these values & resist the imposed values of ego, greed, competition, materialism, ridicule, nationalism, violence, being "right", "getting mine", etc. It takes people leading & living the life of these values. If others resonate with these new values, then a movement is built.

All I can do is love myself & others. I see my own life as an archetype of our greater successes & failures; doing my work has a positive impact on those around me.

> (Note that I came of political age during the tail end of the cultural '60s. I have heard all of the above before....)

Like anything else of nuance, it takes creative iteration.

The '60s changed our understanding of freedom, love, & compassion. The upheaval healed, perpetuated, & created trauma on our souls.

The '60s had a lot of energy breaking social bounds. Sex, drugs, & rock-n-roll, while liberating, is not necessarily the most sustainable emphasis.

Many people went down a more esoteric path learning about ego & love. We can utilize our advances in communication, social understanding, global reach, experience, etc to shift our values to be harmonious with each other & our environment. It's necessary to our survival, so I have faith that we will evolve, just like we have many times in the past (i.e. tools, fire, civilization, etc).

There are years of work and millions of dollars between discovering or inventing a chemical that seems to have a certain health benefit and having a safe, thoroughly tested drug ready for manufacturing. It's the difference between science and engineering.

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