Video for article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSv0deIVzM
A million-dollar drug
21–30 of 215 posts
Re: A million-dollar drug
#22"Well, one pharma company has the patent, and we need to let them charge what they think the market will bear. Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now." Apparently, this is the best the world can manage in 2018.
I don't understand how anyone can think patents are a good idea.
I don't have a problem with the idea of patents. I just think we could be a whole lot more pragmatic about them. They're supposed to incentivize useful behavior.
Re: A million-dollar drug
#23Does anybody know which virus vector was used?
Re: A million-dollar drug
#24The point of the patent system is that we are giving inventors a time-limited monopoly on their invention in exchange for them sharing it with the world. We all benefit because we have access to this new invention and soon can make it ourselves, and the inventor has an incentive to promote and sell as much as they can while they own the monopoly.
But it's not working here. The patent holder is effectively saying society isn't allowed to have the invention. They're using a legal means meant to share the knowledge with the world to instead horde it away from the rest of us.
When the system doesn't work, the system must be improved. How can we incentivize inventors to not do this?
Re: A million-dollar drug
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a fan of it either, but how do we incentivize companies to research and create new drugs if they can't make back the huge cost of clinical trials?
What if governments paid for the clinical trials?
The government does frequently fund the discovery of new drugs. The problem is that the return on that investment is usually abysmal and the taxpayer ends up not only paying to fund the drug’s discovery, but also paying absurdly high prices to buy it from pharmaceutical companies who passed some or all of their risk onto taxpayers.
One example: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651
Re: A million-dollar drug
#26"Well, one pharma company has the patent, and we need to let them charge what they think the market will bear. Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now." Apparently, this is the best the world can manage in 2018.
The last sentence of the article sums it up pretty well: "If it's not commercially viable to produce a certain therapy, unfortunately, in our Western society, it does not happen." And it is far from clear that this is not as it should be, because it's not just LPLD carriers about whom tear-terking stories can be told. $1M can be deployed in other ways that could potentially save more lives. Instead of "Sorry LPLD car…
Except $1 millon is not the entire economy.
It's easy to hide resources by equating them to their monetary value.
The fact is that there exist many millions of dollars, and the way each dollar is spent does not determine the way another dollar is spent.
Re: A million-dollar drug
#27Will other scientific or technological advances (like gene therapy drugs for more common disorders) cause the price of this drug to come down in the future?
Say, if gene therapy became common, there wouldn't be as much red tape for approving this particular one, and there might be machines or research that could be shared with other drugs to amortize the cost?
Re: A million-dollar drug
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The last sentence of the article sums it up pretty well: "If it's not commercially viable to produce a certain therapy, unfortunately, in our Western society, it does not happen." And it is far from clear that this is not as it should be, because it's not just LPLD carriers about whom tear-terking stories can be told. $1M can be deployed in other ways that could potentially save more lives. Instead of "Sorry LPLD car…
Except $1 millon is not the entire economy. It's easy to hide resources by equating them to their monetary value. The fact is that there exist many millions of dollars, and the way each dollar is spent does not determine the way another dollar is spent.
So what? Dollars are still proxies for finite resources, and there are only three possible ways to procure them: their owners can give them voluntarily, they can be forcibly seized by the government through taxation, or the government can print them, which produces inflation and effectively seizes a little bit from everyone who holds dollars (essentially a tax on savings). If you can't get someone to voluntarily spend $1M to save a life, which of the other two processes do you propose to use?
Re: A million-dollar drug
#29The point of the patent system is that we are giving inventors a time-limited monopoly on their invention in exchange for them sharing it with the world. We all benefit because we have access to this new invention and soon can make it ourselves, and the inventor has an incentive to promote and sell as much as they can while they own the monopoly. But it's not working here. The patent holder is effectively saying soci…
If a patent holder is not producing the patented thing, and not licensing it to someone else who is, the patent should expire. Kind of like a trademark that is not defended. Seems that would fix the problem?
Re: A million-dollar drug
#30The point of the patent system is that we are giving inventors a time-limited monopoly on their invention in exchange for them sharing it with the world. We all benefit because we have access to this new invention and soon can make it ourselves, and the inventor has an incentive to promote and sell as much as they can while they own the monopoly. But it's not working here. The patent holder is effectively saying soci…
If the drug is patented, then by definition the best known mode of implementation has been disclosed. That's what a patent is.
The problem with alipogene tiparvovec probably isn't the IPR†. Rather, it's that the treatment is extraordinarily expensive to administer (ironically, because it's something close to a total cure with a long-term impact, the drug seller is required to provide long-term monitoring to patients), has a microscopic market (that's why it's so expensive), and is of questionable effectiveness --- it improves quality-of-life metrics but not necessarily clinical ones like blood fat levels. Many (all?) national health systems in Europe, where it is approved, refuse to pay for it.
If the drug had a clear market, even if the current owner no longer wanted to provide it, it could license to some other drug company. But it's likely that no other viable concern wants to shoulder the costs and uncertainty of this particular drug. That's not the fault of the patent system.
† In fact, it's possible that the patent here has expired; I'm still trying to confirm that, but it would explain why the treatment had "orphan drug" status in Europe.