Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The million-dollar drug (2018)

newsinteractives.cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#41

Post by 5tefan »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #32
exhilaration wrote: post #5

I'm confused, they say it was priced at $1 million because that was what they felt the drug was worth compared to the ongoing therapies needed to keep these patients alive. Ok fine. But once it became clear no one was going to pay that price, wasn't there some lower price that would still earn them a profit?

Probably not, the article mentions that the genetic mutation effects about two or three people out of a million, so that’s ~20,000 doses required to cure everyone in the world. The vast, vast majority of those people are going to be people without insurance or government provided healthcare that would ever pay enough to make a difference, so they’ve got to recoup their entire R&D expenses selling the 2,000-3,000 dose…

Means they recover non through this drug and recover all RD through other drugs.

And let's not forget that this business often operates with sickeningly huge profit margins.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#42

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #37
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they cave and sell it at a price that doesn’t recover their R&D costs (mentioned in the article to be hundreds of millions of dollars), then that’s that, they’ve just lost all of that money. If they sit on it there’s at least a chance that someone in future might pay them for it. sure a chance in that it is not impossible the same way that a talking centaur with the ability to blow up planets with its mind is imp…

> There's a saying that one should not throw good money after bad, in this case it would seem they are refusing good money because it won't cover the bad. They are a drug development company, marketing their drugs to national government health services and private insurance companies. This is an iterative game, in game theory terms. Caving and selling at a loss just guarantees that counterparties will refuse to buy a…

>In the years since they refused the $1M price tag in an attempt to drive a hard bargain, the national governments and private insurance companies have no doubt spent more than $1M per patient they refused to buy a dose for.

I wouldn't make the assumption on that, given the disease is potentially deadly. I would more likely make the assumption that the private insurance companies especially did the math and figured they end up a couple hundred thousand ahead in the most likely scenarios. But I'm prone to cynicism.

>> Also tax writeoffs exist, so I'm not sure what that R&D actually cost them?

>I think you have some major misunderstandings about what tax writeoffs are and how they work.

perhaps, but I do experience that sometimes in my business it can make sense to spend money on things and make less profits in order to have less taxes to pay, on paper things might look worse off but I somehow feel that I'm doing better nonetheless.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#43

Post by jfoster »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #27
epicureanideal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternatively, try to hire some chemistry grad students to make some.

That might be surprisingly feasible. https://www.resetera.com/threads/guy-cures-himself-of-lactos...

If he can do this at home, why hasn't a pharmaceutical company made something equivalent for the incredibly large population of lactose intolerant people around the world?

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#44

Post by carlmr »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: post #16

Never mind non-practicing entities for software patents, but surely for patents on medicine keeping them valid when no one is making any is entirely bogus and not deserving of legal protection?

If you invalidate people’s patents for trying to sell their drug at a price high enough to recover R&D costs, they’ll just stop doing R&D for any drugs that will have niche target populations.

This isn't the same though, this is invalidating patents for drugs that have been developed that no one is producing anymore.

Patent protection makes sense to inventivize development and production. In this case development already happened and only production stopped. So it doesn't make sense to uphold this patent.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#45

Post by DeathArrow »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #29
stefan_ wrote: post #16

Never mind non-practicing entities for software patents, but surely for patents on medicine keeping them valid when no one is making any is entirely bogus and not deserving of legal protection?

If you invalidate people’s patents for trying to sell their drug at a price high enough to recover R&D costs, they’ll just stop doing R&D for any drugs that will have niche target populations.

I don't want to sound like a communist but it's not people who are holding patents and funding research. Usually research is funded by governments by subsidizing universities and research institutions or by companies.

So we can have governments continuing to subsidize research, but forbid universities and research institutions to sell the rights to only one company.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#46

Post by DoreenMichele »

jfoster wrote: post #43
DoreenMichele wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be surprisingly feasible. https://www.resetera.com/threads/guy-cures-himself-of-lactos...

If he can do this at home, why hasn't a pharmaceutical company made something equivalent for the incredibly large population of lactose intolerant people around the world?

It wasn't done at home. It was done in a lab by someone who majored in biology for the express purpose of finding a cure for his lactose intolerance.

It's been a bit since I watched the two videos* he made, so I don't remember the details. But it was the first time I ever felt anything positive about gene therapy. I'm too used to seeing people like me treated like Frankenstein's monster so people can do cool science and not care about the suffering of their human guinea pigs.

But most likely the short version is that he was only using this on himself. He didn't need to get FDA approval or do clinical trials.

That's an enormously frustrating process for the folks with incurable conditions who just tear their hair out over decisions to deny approval because something bad might happen down the road. We tend to feel like "Let me live long enough to have those problems, you ass!!!!"

But those processes exist for a reason. (Look up Thalidomide if you care to know how wrong things can go.)

Maybe someday there will be a readily available gene therapy for lactose intolerance. Maybe his work will be the starting point for it.

* He has made a lot more than two videos but there are two specifically about this gene therapy he administered to himself.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#48

Post by thinkloop »

Everyone is blaming the company or the patent system or general greed, but really there is an extremely simple solution: pay the $1M. In Canada and Europe it's medicare, ie taxes, ie the general population that would pay for it, but they refused. In the US it's insurance companies, ie the general population (as insurance is just socialized losses), that refused. If people are uninsured then force the state, ie everyone who is feeling so bad about it, to pay for it. It's odd that being the genius inventors also means that you now also have to be the only ones to pay for it. This isn't a story of exorbitant profits - even at a million a dose they would barely make their money back. It makes no sense to isolate the group of people who are actually working on the thing to be the only ones to pay for it.

By extension, this story demonstrates how we price life. What if the cure was a billion dollars, is that worth society paying? What about a trillion? At one point a limit is reached, and it seems that one million is one of those limits that we all quietly agree upon.

Re: The million-dollar drug (2018)

#49

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #42
dodobirdlord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a saying that one should not throw good money after bad, in this case it would seem they are refusing good money because it won't cover the bad. They are a drug development company, marketing their drugs to national government health services and private insurance companies. This is an iterative game, in game theory terms. Caving and selling at a loss just guarantees that counterparties will refuse to buy a…

>In the years since they refused the $1M price tag in an attempt to drive a hard bargain, the national governments and private insurance companies have no doubt spent more than $1M per patient they refused to buy a dose for. I wouldn't make the assumption on that, given the disease is potentially deadly. I would more likely make the assumption that the private insurance companies especially did the math and figured t…

obviously comparing my business as a consultant to a pharmaceutical company is like comparing a single raisin to a field of watermelons, but I am of the opinion based on reading that the benefits of spending money to reduce profits and taxes seems to be greater the larger the business, and thus that the principle must hold.
Post reply on HN