[Retric]

Drug patents on their own represent a 1 Trillion dollar industry world wide.

So, I doubt that's true. Really the patent office could spend 100 billion per year and still be a net gain for society. The problem seems to be many people have a lot to gain from a broken patent system, and most people don't care.

[marcosdumay]

It's not exactly clear if patents help or harm the drug industry.

It's clear they play some very important roles, and the entire industry is structured around them. So, I sympathize with people that think it's too risky to change them. But I can't agree with that certainty on your comment.

[Retric]

Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer vs develop. So, without patents their would be zero incentive for private drug R&D funding.

It's very clear that patents are required by the drug industry before they will invest in Research or as often happens buy companies that have done research.

Now, if we give up all private R&D we could still manufacture existing drugs at much lower prices. But, turning over all drug research to non for profits and governments is a very steep price to pay.

PS: Ok their are some game theory based approaches where small countries could benefit from abolishing drug patents while benefiting from other countries research. But, that does not scale worldwide.

[toasterlovin]

FWIW, we will probably need to figure out an effective way to fund non-commercial drug research anyway, since pharmaceutical companies are really only interested in certain classes of drugs (mostly drugs that treat symptoms of chronic conditions, rather than drugs which permanently solve diseases or drugs which treat short lived conditions).

[notlob]

This is an inaccurate portrayal of the pharmaceutical industry. Take CAR-T as one obvious counterexample.

[toasterlovin]

I’m very open to being wrong here, but for the specific example of CAR-T, Wikipedia mentions that it was initially developed by researchers at a university in Israel. So not the pharmaceutical industry.

[notlob]

UPenn and Novartis brought Kymriah to market and Kite brought Yescarta to market. Universities can be great for discovery and sponsored research, but they are not leading the work needed to get to market and they are certainly not funding it. Universities efforts are the visible tip of the iceberg, pharma efforts are the bulk under the surface.