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India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

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Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#51

Post by refurb »

mistercow wrote: post #46
smallblacksun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

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".

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#52

Post by pm90 »

politician wrote: post #44
WiseWeasel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are also averse to dying of AIDS and cancer.

That is exactly the reason why we shouldn't allow desperate people to be used as canon fodder for research in nations which are better known for corruption and reverse engineering. Or are you saying that the poor should feel lucky for the opportunity to sign up for experimentation?

I'm not sure if that's what he meant. I think what he meant is that: use poor people cheaply for testing ==> make drugs faster ==> more poor people saved I'm really interested in the ethical questions involved in this matter, I'm sure of what side I am ethically on this, because I simply have to imagine what it would be if _I_ was the poor guinea pig (which could have happened btw, I was really really lucky to born to middle-class parents). But this is on very slippery slope; when you become desperate, it's where you start trying to justify a class of human beings as being `lesser'; and once you do that you've opened Pandora's box (Aryan race etc etc)

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#53

Post by refurb »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #15
ig1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if these drugs end up entering the grey market in the developed world, it disincentives investment in the next generation of drugs. Huge amounts of money have to be raised to make a new drug. The cost of bringing a new drug to market is typically $800m-$1.2bn (i.e more than exit value of Instagram or Yammer is required just to get to launch). With treatments for viruses it gets even more problemat…

This argument is demonstrably false. Look at any commodity market, with no barriers to entry, no IP protection, thin margins, say: making bread. The logic that everybody will stop making bread because there's more money to be made in making iPads is false. The general rule is: as long as there is money to be made, people will compete for this money. There's a lot of money to be made in drugs and as long as it's true,…

Trust me, it's much more than $1B per drug.

Just take a look at how many drugs those multi-billion dollar per year R&D budgets get you.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tru...

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#54

Post by WiseWeasel »

politician wrote: post #44
WiseWeasel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are also averse to dying of AIDS and cancer.

That is exactly the reason why we shouldn't allow desperate people to be used as canon fodder for research in nations which are better known for corruption and reverse engineering. Or are you saying that the poor should feel lucky for the opportunity to sign up for experimentation?

The goal should be for all people to have access to health care, and since it's less capital-intensive to launch a drug in India than it is in the US, then maybe that should be the norm. New drugs would be much more accessible with less investment to pay back.

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#55

Post by rjuyal »

kamaal wrote: post #43
ashishgandhi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh most definitely! I totally agree with making healthcare accesible to all income groups and at the same time cheaper for everyone. Don't like to copy-paste but in one of my other comments I wrote: ... Debate about models such as free public healthcare, compulsory insurance, compulsory insurance where the government pays the difference that the less wealthy can't make up for, etc... ( http://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

Actually back in the days of PSU's like HAL, ITI, BHEL .. etc. These schemes where there. You could even go to private clinics. I mean you could go to a good private clinic, get yourself good healthcare and it would be paid for with your + company's contributions. There were even hospitals that ran minimal payment schemes like MS Ramiah Hospital in Bangalore. Where the hospital trust would finance the difference of t…

That is awesome kamaal.

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#56

Post by jamesaguilar »

ashishgandhi wrote: post #13

Indian pharmaceuticals are a joke. They have zero inventions to their name. Their "secret" to selling drugs cheap lays in the following line from the article. "In 1972, India made only the process for making drugs patentable, not the drugs themselves." Do you really think this is smart? Heavy R&D costs are involved in coming up with compounds that save lives. If you only have the manufacturing process that's patentab…

It's a very smart approach during the catching up phase. Basically, it's an unstoppable free-riding mechanism.

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#57

Post by ajays »

ashishgandhi wrote: post #13

Indian pharmaceuticals are a joke. They have zero inventions to their name. Their "secret" to selling drugs cheap lays in the following line from the article. "In 1972, India made only the process for making drugs patentable, not the drugs themselves." Do you really think this is smart? Heavy R&D costs are involved in coming up with compounds that save lives. If you only have the manufacturing process that's patentab…

On the other hand: the rest of the world has benefited a lot from the Indian pharma industry's growth. The same companies that you're criticizing are actually subcontracted by Bayer, etc. to produce their products so they can be sold in the developing world. If Indian did not produce these medicines, they would not be available to the poor at all. So at least they're saving lives that the developed world wasn't interested in saving.

Secondly: historically, Indian pharma growth was stunted due to old British laws. Once the industry was unshackled, it grew at a breathtaking rate, mostly by building generic variants of well-known drugs. This has allowed the Indian pharma industry to develop enough local expertise about formulation, manufacturing and distribution. Now they're moving up the food chain by patenting new drugs. Ranbaxy Labs, for example, is busy filing patents[1].

You can't expect the domestic industry to just sprout up organically. The Indian government never spent much money on R&D, so there wasn't much local drug research. But now that they're under the same patent regime, the Indian industries will have to figure out a way to survive.

Having said all this: please don't assume that Western drug companies' hands are clean. They are busy trawling the jungles of Amazon (among other places) to find new compounds, often taking knowledge from local shamans, etc. without any respect for their "IP".

[1] http://www.financialexpress.com/news/ranbaxy-tops-third-worl...

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#59

Post by kamjam »

kamaal wrote: post #43
ashishgandhi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh most definitely! I totally agree with making healthcare accesible to all income groups and at the same time cheaper for everyone. Don't like to copy-paste but in one of my other comments I wrote: ... Debate about models such as free public healthcare, compulsory insurance, compulsory insurance where the government pays the difference that the less wealthy can't make up for, etc... ( http://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

Actually back in the days of PSU's like HAL, ITI, BHEL .. etc. These schemes where there. You could even go to private clinics. I mean you could go to a good private clinic, get yourself good healthcare and it would be paid for with your + company's contributions. There were even hospitals that ran minimal payment schemes like MS Ramiah Hospital in Bangalore. Where the hospital trust would finance the difference of t…

Out of interest, what kind of healthcare reforms are you talking about? Something like they have in the US, via paid insurance, or something like they have in the UK with "free" healthcare for all via the NHS?

If it's the latter, with a population of 1.2 billion, this would surely bankrupt India?

Re: India firm shakes up cancer drug market with price cuts

#60

Post by kamjam »

uvdiv wrote: post #8
mistercow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.
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