[qwerty85344324i]

Serious question for anyone opposes this. What incentive would pharma companies have to publish their secret formulas if Indian generics simply take the IP and drastically undercut prices, preventing the pharma companies from making any profit on the billions they invested in their research? What would compel these pharma companies to invest in any further research?

[exelius]

Very little; which is why pharma research is such a problematic industry. We need to seriously rethink the way we develop drugs:

1. Research does not get funded unless there is a commercial market for the drug. This leads to overfunding of maintenance treatments of chronic diseases like diabetes, because they are widespread and never really go away. Meanwhile, the system does not incentivize investment in things like antibiotics (because the next wide-spectrum antibiotic that gets developed will likely be force-licensed for public health interests).

2. For the vast majority of life-threatening diseases that anyone is likely to catch, the most effective drugs are already off-patent. Unless you can significantly improve outcomes, how can you compete with a generic that works 95% as well as your new drug?

3. The only country currently willing to pay sticker price for pharmaceuticals is the US. Every other country negotiates prices down to a fraction of what the US pays. The idea of a month worth of pills costing $400 is unheard of outside the US. So US citizens are either directly subsidizing the cheap drugs for the rest of the world, or we're getting taken for a ride.

4. The majority of the cost of developing a drug comes in the clinical trial phases. This cost is the same for any drug -- and most of this is marketing budget. Studies are designed to have specific outcomes so they can be listed as bullet points on information sheets given to doctors -- doctors are smart, but they're busy, so if you can do a study saying that "outcomes in high-risk patients were improved by 30% over the leading treatment", the doctors will never look to see what high-risk patients means, whether the study was done correctly, or even what an improved outcome looks like for those patients. Never mind you may have done the study 8 times and this outcome was only observed once.

Pharma is broken. Our current pharma industry is geared towards "lifecycle" drugs that alleviate symptoms rather than fixing any underlying problems.

[drabiega]

I'm not sure why you need to get hypothetical here. Clearly, they currently have sufficient incentive since they're currently investing in research. They are trying to get a likely small amount of additional money (the people in India who could actually afford their prices) in return for an immense cost human cost.(The people who would lose access because of their prices) Why would anyone not oppose this?

[saint_fiasco]

>Clearly, they currently have sufficient incentive since they're currently investing in research

Drug research takes a long time. The drugs that cause this debate are drugs that the pharmaceutical companies decided to research decades ago, when they seriously expected people would respect intellectual property rights more than human lives.

Now that they know better, they will probably go invent a new Viagra or something instead of inventing something useful which can be prematurely generified for the common good.

[meric]

And that's okay. I'll take millions of Indian lives now than thousands of American's and hundreds of Indians in ten years - when a new drug that can save some lives potentially comes onto the market, a new drug not many people can afford.

[saint_fiasco]

I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers. It's very difficult to calculate the costs in human lives of all the drugs that won't be invented in the future.

Lots of people are already dying of antibiotic resistant bacteria, for example, and that's a problem likely to get worse over time.

[meric]

The average Indian cannot afford to take a 1USD per tablet drug once a day. So if that's how all the new drugs are going to be priced - significantly higher than generics, then I say India should go ahead and make generic versions of those drugs, even if it will in future break international law. Who are you to say they should sacrifice their lives so you can have access to better drugs 10 years later that they can't afford anyway?

[saint_fiasco]

India can make generic versions of old drugs. For people who can't afford 1USD a day, having access to bleeding edge medicine isn't going to make as much of a difference as having access to nurses and penicillin. edit: and sanitation, and health education, and so on.

EDIT: Not to mention having their own research and development. I bet it's cheaper to research stuff in India, but evil selfish pharma companies don't want to invest in research in countries with poor intellectual properties protection.

[meric]

They don't even need the information published - many of the patented medicines are simply reverse engineered in India.

[ekianjo]

You don't need to "reverse engineer" anything. The large majority of the drugs of the market are in the category of small molecules and they are well known and described everywhere. Any organic chemist from any university can draft a synthesis path.

the only thing holding the system in place are the patents, not the knowledge.

[1971genocide]

As someone who did AP chemistry and then went straight into programming. How would I go about learning more of this knowledge ?

[ekianjo]

Go back to get a Master's in Organic Chemistry like everyone else :) You can find books and online resources, but for actual hands-on practice you need to have labs at hand. (Disclosure: I'm an Organic Chemist).

[qwerty85344324i]

They're investing in research on the expectation that their patents will be honored. If patents are ignored, what do you think this will do to any future research that requires tons in capital expenditures?

[newjersey]

Their patents continue to be honored in the US. I don't think we have any right to ask India to honor US patents unless they are exporting the products to the US.

This is money grab. There is no way to justify it. If they think the money isn't there, they are more than welcome to stop the research.

[Thriptic]

What happens when more countries decide that they're only willing to pay generic prices. The financial incentive to do the R&D will disappear.

[fla]

But up to what point ? What happens when investing into research becomes too risky ? This is a tough problem.

[nnain]

qwerty's question isn't hypothetical. Pharma research indeed is a high stakes game.

What's more appropriate to ask though is how do developing/under-developed countries compete with the money spending power of west. Are the poor people forever destined to look for aid from the west? If they ain't creating all the drugs, they ain't creating all the horrible diseases either. Many tribes were perfectly happy and healthy until the intruders affected their ecosystem.

[mjburgess]

Many tribes were perfectly happy and healthy until the intruders affected their ecosystem.

No. That's just your american white guilt playing up.

[joesmo]

I think billions of dollars in profit should be enough, don't you?

[saint_fiasco]

I think you are focusing on the successful pharma products.

When a company begins an expensive research project, they don't know beforehand if it will be profitable or not.

If little-to-medium pharma were compensated generously for the risks they take, they would make more research in new drugs, but because the risk is not compensated, only big pharma can afford the research.

[joesmo]

I don't see how that changes the fact that these companies have profits in the billions, are still not satisfied, and are willing to contribute to the murder of millions to increase their profits. India should have some fucking balls and stand up for its people and repeal these patent laws designed to make a couple of people rich while murdering so many.

[saint_fiasco]

I don't see how enforcing patents is equivalent to murder.

It's not like if it weren't for the evil pharma companies, everyone would have access to advanced medicine. Quite the contrary, in fact.

We are not talking about software here. Developing medications requires huge investments in developed countries, and no one will develop in the other countries because there is no patent protection in those countries.

[qwerty85344324i]

I don't understand what you're implying. A drug requires billions in investment. Why would a company invest billions into a new drug if they can't make that money back?

[noselasd]

He's implying that they already make their money back, and that billions in investment does pay off, even with the existence of Indian generics - and that will continue to hold true in the future.

Ofcourse from the big pharmacy side, the generics represents lost opportunities, they want to make more money.

[hittaruki]

As an example one of the Pharma companies mentioned Novartis is very much profitable. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-28/novartis-t...

[qwerty85344324i]

I am still finding it hard to understand this argument. Why do you think pharma companies like Novartis will continue to be profitable if all of their patents and future patents are ignored? Why would any pharma company invest billions into new research when their IP could just be stolen by an Indian generic and sold for pennies on the dollar?

[joesmo]

Because they're still making billions? But hey, we're not making as many billions as we could. Let's just shut it all down for good. Your reasoning is stupid.

[saint_fiasco]

The drugs that make them billions are things like Xanax, Prozac and Viagra.

We need to incentivize research into important medicine (ie antibiotics, or something to actually cure AIDS and malaria for good), which is hard because as soon as they develop something actually useful, people refuse to honor their patents.

[joesmo]

They make billions regardless of India's patent laws. Why should India let its people die so some company executives somewhere can make a few more billion?

[ekianjo]

> I don't understand what you're implying. A drug requires billions in investment. Why would a company invest billions into a new drug if they can't make that money back?

Well pharma companies tend to spend so much money because they are run very inefficiently in the first place. Plus there's the cost of lobbying...

[tim333]

They can make the billions back from the US, EU etc, not the $1 a day countries.

[saint_fiasco]

Problem is, in the developed countries the more profitable drugs are cosmetics, antidepressants and Viagra.

That means research into important drugs like antibiotics, HIV and malaria medicine is underfunded.