[deadbea7]

I would also give credit to Indian patent laws that allow people like him to shake things up.

"In 1972, India made only the process for making drugs patentable, not the drugs themselves."

Compare this to the US where I believe you can patent the active ingredients of a drug, allowing pharmaceuticals to charge more for lifesaving medicine for a longer period of time.

[mistercow]

Wow, that's a really smart policy on several levels. Besides not stifling competition regarding individual drugs, it encourages companies to develop new methods of synthesis, which has potential side benefits like making the market less fragile against shortages of raw ingredients.

[uvdiv]

It also sets the value of discovering new drugs at $0. What's smart about that?

[kamjam]

Well, that's the same value the big pharma's put on human life when it can't afford their high priced drugs, so I don't see anything not smart about it.

[mistercow]

Really, you think the value of having a monopoly on the only known process for making a drug and being first to market with that drug is $0?

[smallblacksun]

Not 0, but vastly less than the cost of discovering and getting approval for a new drug. The vast majority of medical compounds are not particularly difficult to synthesize, meaning that the value of the process patent is relatively small. Once you release the drug, you will only have a very brief period before a competitor is able to come to market. In particular, they will not need to undergo clinical trials, which are very long (multiple years) and expensive (often hundreds of millions of dollars).

[mistercow]

>Not 0, but vastly less than the cost of discovering and getting approval for a new drug.

I'm going to need to see some hard data on both sides before I'll simply accept that claim.

There are also alternative solutions we could use besides granting the first company a total monopoly. For example, generics could be taxed early on in order to subsidize the approval process for new drugs.

[refurb]

Really? You'd tax the makers of generic drugs and then give that money to the big drug companies to subsidize their R&D?

Waston pharmaceuticals, one of the largest generic drugs makers in the US has total sales of $4.6B. Pfizer, one of the biggest drug companies in the world, has an R&D budget of $8.5B.

Even if you doubled the price of all of Waston's drugs through a tax and gave that to Pfizer, you wouldn't even cover half of their R&D expense.

Without a patent system, there would be zero incentive to create new drug. A drug company could spend $100M to get a new drug to market and with the typical 8 years of patent life, charge the exact price (let's say $100/month, with $90 being profit) to recoup their expenses (no long-term profit). It would be a SIMPLISTIC exercise for another company to come in and starting selling the drug for $20/month and make $10 in profit, having the benefit of never coming up with the $100M to get the drug approved.

I agree that there are alternatives to the current patent system, but like democracy, "it may not be perfect, but it's the best system so far".

[boundlessdreamz]

From the article

"But in 2005, India brought its law in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules recognising 20-year patents, pushing up the prices of newly launched drugs."