Now if only the government here let loose of the control over the industry and let the stem cell and other research expand we could probably have what you saw in Germany here. The government and those who pull the strings make too much off of pharmaceuticals so they won't let it go right now. They use the religious aspect to sell to their constituency to keep a hold over it.
Yeah, the clinic that started the whole process was out of LA and they contracted us to have the stem cell transplants performed down in the Dominican Republic because it was illegal in the US. Not FDA approved so no hospitals or licensed clinics could do it, plus the fetuses were all harvested from abortions performed in Eastern Europe (where abortions were the primary form of birth control) and that was back in the day when W was president so there was no way they were allowing that here even on an experimental basis. Expensive as hell and not a penny covered by insurance. Germany was more about chemo delivered under hyperthermia conditions and targeted chemos and some funky injectables (mistletoe which you can't get in the US because it's poison) and yeast wraps. No joke, yeast wraps and they made the tumors under the skin in my wife's chest shrink literally within hours. Smelled like a bier garten but it worked. _
Yeah, wasn't sure about what was legal where, only that it is not legal here because the politicians can't make money if things are actually cured.
Exactly. My son suffers from Autism. And while it is an incurable disorder, the treatment he receives has helped tremendously.
This is why there should be more public funding of medical research. For all the problems (and there are many) with federal funding programs, if you want cures (and not treatments), they come from funding the basic medical research being done by the doctors and scientists who are interested in the cure... not from letting for-profit companies decide what avenues are profitable enough to sink dollars into. Novartis and Pfizer are not likely to pour tens of millions of dollars into researching a cure. They might... with the right leadership... but it's not likely. I know a lot of good researchers -- good people -- who are most definitely interested in finding a cure. The problem right now is that NIH funding, which drives a lot of the basic research, has more or less flatlined since... 2008? I think? And this is where you are most likely to find the cures instead of the treatments. The thing is, it (usually) takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug. For-profit companies aren't going to invest that kind of money into a drug without some kind of return. This part has nothing to do with the politics; it's just basic business sense. Want to change that? Fund the hell out of the NIH. Will there be waste? Sure. Will there be tons of dead ends? Of course. Will there be people trying to take advantage of the situation? Undoubtedly. But the cures lie in the basic research, not specialized drug design. Either that, or change the incentives for the for-profit companies. Give them a 100-year patent on cures instead of the 10-year patents that currently exist. That might not be enough to satisfy shareholders... but that probably speaks to the need to change the incentives in that area, as well. Markets can do amazing things when properly incentivized.
I'd much prefer they attempt to "properly incentivize" for the free market as you put it. We're taxed enough already. Would a 100 year patent even be enough incentive though? I know it's not profitable to create a cure now - does your suggestion solve that?
Probably not. Maybe. I don't know. The thing is, basic medical research is the kind of thing for which we should WANT to pay taxes. Because it's really, really hard to get the private market to do that work. And it's important work. Oil subsidies, farm subsidies, military spending. You could take 10% of each of those areas and increase the NIH research budget several times over without significantly impacting productivity or profitability of those other areas. The NIH has lost 25% of it's spending power in the past ten years or do due to inflation and budget cuts. In the long run, incentivizing the private market to do something it really doesn't want to do would probably be more expensive than funding basic research for this particular problem, especially considering the infrastructure is already in place.
I would have no problem with them playing a shell game with the existing taxes to move more into medical research but the problem is it won't happen. They'll just ask for take more and continue to waste elsewhere.
Well that's the real problem, isn't it? People want service X, but don't want to pay for it. No one WANTS to pay taxes just for the fun of it. But if you want cure-based research, it costs money. Lots of it. And this isn't the kind of problem the private market is good at solving. Sure, there'll be waste and fraud and blah blah blah. There's always some. But this is where the answers are going to come from when it comes to biomedical research. Do we want the cures or not?
That's a horrible idea. Patents stifle progress in the advanced technology/medical sector more than they support growth and research. You offer the incentive of a 100 year patent and there will be so many patent trolls out there we won't see another decent medical drug advancement perhaps again. Cappy is right, the best solution is to fund the NIH and invest more public $$ into medical research. I agree completely with his posts.
I can only speak for myself and not all people but for me I disagree. I don't mind paying for service X, the problem I have is paying for A, B, C, D, E, F and G that are all giants mismanaged wastes.
It costs about $1.5B to take a drug from design to market. Only about 3% of designs actually make a viable drug. The patent time starts ticking from the moment the IDL is filed and it take 8-10 years to go through all testing before a drug hits the market. This leaves companies with only 3-5 years of exclusivity to recoup money spent on research and make profit. Increasing patent time will lead to more time to recover money spent and make profit, thus leading to more drugs being developed.
In an ideal world you may be right. The problem is it doesn't work like that. It should go - discovery to patent to market but it doesn't. A) patents are getting approved that are way too general...that creates B) people in turn care more about patents than the technology. A pfizer for example has zillions of dollars to spare. Because patents are relatively expensive to obtain (by researcher standards) but a flash in the pan for a Pfizer and generally pretty easy beyond that. They will just flood money into patenting everything... they aren't necessarily planning on ever taking the technology to market, they are just waiting for someone else to so they can have their expensive lawyers chase them in court years down the line over a silly general patent so they can settle up for billions. In the meantime they look like they are doing great research work and on the surface all is well. (i just used pfizer as an example - I don't mean to pick on them, I don't know enough about them specifically I just am commenting on the big boys in the industry. Bigger problems perhaps are the holding companies that "invest" in research.. i digress) Now take what I said and imagine you and me are chemists at Big State University fooling around in the lab and we stumble across the cure for cancer. That's where our progress hits a road block. We would have to get the lawyers involved then. Can we afford patents? What if there already is a patent for our discovery? What if a pfizer patented something really general having to do with our compound discovery -is that an infringement? if so how do we get over paying for that? Do we just sell what we discovered to them? What if they don't want it?
You're missing the point I think. It doesn't matter who specifically scrambled upon potential cure. The amount of money to bring it to market is still the same because process is mandated by Feds. You have to go through all 3 stages, you have to validate and prove every single step, including proposed manufacturing process. The IDL submission are truckload of papers. And I mean LITERALLY a whole truck filled with paper boxes. Re patents, with drugs patents are not generic, they are specific in extreme. You specify everything, from precise formula and structure of the drug, to specific method of manufacturing, to specific method of cleaning tools and cleaning validation. This specificity is the reason why generic drugs exist. A competitor needs to alter just one, often irrelevant aspect of process, to avoid patent violation.
