[dodobirdlord]

In the example we’re talking about here in the article, university research generated the treatment itself, and then a pharmaceutical company spent hundred of millions of dollars conducting clinical trials and bringing the drug to market, including wrangling with regulators and lobbying EU politicians directly to get acceptance of the safety and efficacy of the treatment in spite of the small sample size of the trials due to the extreme rarity of people with this disorder.

So the question of who did the initial research and who funded it isn’t really important to the question of whether invalidating patents left and right will negatively impact the rate at which new drugs are brought to market.

If the government wants the company’s patents and distribution rights, at this point I’m sure they’d be willing to sell everything over to the government at cost. Clearly no government is interested in buying the rights for $200M, any more than they are interested in buying doses for $1M each. The company that brought this treatment to market has clearly gotten utterly screwed here, and the nature of the comments on the article suggest that a lot of people here are disappointed that no governments have intervened to screw them even more for the audacity of thinking that they should be compensated for their work.

Perhaps the lesson here is that maybe seizing their parents for not selling their treatment at a loss isn’t actually a bad idea. Maybe there’s no risk of discouraging pharmaceutical companies from developing expensive treatments for niche conditions, since it’s already clearly a terrible idea, and companies already won’t be making the mistake of ever doing it again.