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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

#61

Post by kamaal »

kamjam wrote: post #59
kamaal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No free stuff.

We need to learn to work for the things we get.

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

#62

Post by wisty »

anaheim wrote: post #22
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…

cost to invent drugs = identifying compounds (90%, say) + determining manufacturing process (10%) ^ Where are you getting these numbers from? They seem way too simplistic, and your argument essentially falls apart without them. Real 'invention cost' would be determined by far more factors - cost of raw materials - labour cost (I bet it's cheaper for pharmaceutical companies to pay workers much lesser in India too.),…

Good question. Let me break it down for you:

Of 5,000 new compounds, you'll find 250 which are interesting enough to test in a lab (animals or in vitro), 5 which are interesting enough to test on humans, and 1 which gets approved.

It costs peanuts to find the 5,000 new compounds, and a little bit to figure out which ones are interesting (say, $50,000 each, about $250 million). Those 250 interesting drugs will cost a million each to test - subtotal $250,000. The 5 drugs which are tested on humans cost a fair bit (say $50 million each - $250 million for all 5). Getting the final compound approved takes a lot too, because you need a massive trial.

All up, it's about $1 billion per drug.

If you want to reverse engineer it, it's about $10 million dollars for a chemical engineer to read the publicly available formula, figure out how to synthesize it, and set up a small plant.

Whether it's a new drug, or a drug you copied, it costs a few cents labor / materials to make each dose once the factory is built. Yes, India could knock $0.01 off each tablet, by employing cheaper factory techs. But no-one cares about saving $0.01 off a $1 product.

India could do the R&D cheaper, but not a lot cheaper. It's like building an OS - you need experience people who know what they are doing, not just cheap process workers.

Ripping off US companies isn't a bad idea, because it lets Indian workers gain more experience, which will help them create better R&D jobs. In the long run, this might even be good for the US, because Indian R&D could create a lot of good drugs for the US to buy.

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

#63

Post by mistercow »

refurb wrote: post #51
mistercow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cov…

>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.

A couple of points:

First off, comparing individual companies to individual companies is pointless. I'm saying that the whole shape of the pharmaceutical industry is wrong, and if sweeping changes were made, it should be possible to increase both the number and size of generic manufacturers out there. Right now there are huge barriers to entry imposed by regulations intended to keep R&D profitable, and those barriers continue to act on existing companies with the expiration of each patent.

Secondly, you could quintuple the price of all of Watson's drugs through a tax and the drugs would cost less than Pfizer's.

>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".

I think that statement is impossible to even speculate about. Yeah, we have much more rapid drug development than we used to, but that could just as well be explained by our civilization's overall technological advancement as by our obviously broken and destructive drug patent, approval, and regulatory systems.

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

#64

Post by _juof »

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…

What cipla is doing can be considered as a legal innovation .And it seems like a legal practice that does very little damage to drug companies , and great benefit to consumers.

In a world rich with technology innovation, marketing innovation, distribution innovation(amazon fulfillment services, etc),organizational innovations(open source,etc) and manufacturing innovation the biggest barriers left in many industries are legal and regulatory issues.

There's immense value to be unlocked using regulatory innovation in education(khan academy in k-12 schools), healthcare(almost everything about it), energy(new nuclear power tech), hotels(the whole airBNB legal questions) and other fields.

Shouldn't we even try ?

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

#65

Post by mjwalshe »

ig1 wrote: post #5
drsim wrote: post #2

The world needs more people like him: in a position of power with the guts to stick it to companies who put money before humanitarianism.

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…

and I am afraid that India has a shady counterfeit drugs industry where they are selling drugs with less than the required amount of the active ingredient which leads to resistance to say aids drugs.

And when the BBC World Service investigated they people who talk to them had to have their identity & voices disguised because they did not want to end up dead

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

#66

Post by mjwalshe »

DufusM wrote: post #32
cdooh wrote: post #6

Why is Cipla able to produce the drug at a fifth the price? Can someone please explain how Western companies price their drugs? How much do they send on R&D, marketing and all that? I mean it doesn't really make them look good does it? P.S. Being from Africa I can testify to how much of a difference Cipla's 1dollar a day AIDS drugs make a huge difference!! Here in Kenya medication is given free of charge under govern…

From what I have heard from people who work in pharma companies in India, the main reasons drugs are cheaper when manufactured in India are: - not much R&D costs to design new drugs (however they do spend on designing the manufacturing process) - cheap labor for manufacturing, including a good supply of chemical engineers. - environmental regulations for chemical manufacturing are stricter in Western countries.

yes as the residents of Bohpal can tell you - well the ones that are still alive that is

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

#67

Post by accountswu »

accountswu wrote: post #9
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…

Whatever the complexities of the system, the bottomline is that for-profit corporations should not be allowed to milk medical "consumers" the way they are allowed in the US. If the US can bail out the banksters with trillions of dollars (yes, the Federal Reserve printed trillions and gave it to corporations, not just American banksters and corporations but to corporate buddies all over the world), why must an America…

Each statement above is a valid statement and you can verify it.

No reply to the comment but down votes? I didn't know we also had banksters at Hackernews.

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