Antibiotic Resistant Staph Antibiotic Discovered 493
edward.virtually@pob writes "CNN is reporting that a team of scientists has discovered an extremely effective killer of the antibiotic resistant form of staph infection occuring naturally in rock pools. Unfortunately, despite the obvious cheap potential availability of this cure, do not expect it to be cheaply available. The employer of the scientists, AquaPharm Bio-Discovery Limited, the story notes 'is keeping the identity of its MRSA-killing bacteria a closely guarded secret, and taken out patents on how they can be cultivated and used.' Oh well."
And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote Cartman, "Damn hippies."
This makes some sense. (Score:3, Insightful)
(YES, I have RTFA.)
Well, duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:2, Insightful)
And no, I am no communist. But I do think being humane is the 1st rule in the capitalist world. If not, I think our world's near its death of humanity.
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patenting.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not an argument for being able to artificially restrict supply of a potentially life saving drug, that's an argument for rethinking how R&D is performed in our economy.
Realistically, if people are dying because our brand of capitalism requires artificial scarcity in order to get research done, then we need to change our economic system sharpish, not just write it off as "oh well, life isn't fair".
reality check (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patenting.. (Score:2, Insightful)
When it comes to human life no abuse of patents should be allowed. Everyone should have a chance for a cure.
Drug patents worse than software patents (Score:2, Insightful)
We spend a lot of time bitching about software patents around here. Drug patents are worse, though. There's a difference, in that (to my knowledge) most drug patents involve more actual research and investment than the chikenshit software and business method patents we see. However, this doesn't change the fact that drug patents are not only killing our economy, but they're also unethical and immoral.
Killing our economy you say? Hello? Pharmaceutical industries are one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, and doubtless most of us have mutual funds highly bolstered by investments in pharmaceutical companies. Well, fine, but look at the bigger picture. Health care costs are spiraling. The reason? Part of it is due to spiraling drug prices. And drug prices are expensive because they're proprietary; once you can get a generic substitute, drugs come much cheaper. They would be much cheaper to start with if generics were available sooner. And that would take a huge burden off of employer sponsored health plans (which are getting more expensive and covering less), not to mention state and federal health plans which are in serious trouble even as we're talking about adding a perscription drug plan to medicate. Every "cost saving" plan I see just shifts the costs around, it doesn't address any of the reasons why the costs are too high. Eliminating pharmaceutical patents would address that reason.
Unethical and immoral? That one's more obvious. Never mind the poor folk in our country (I'm in the USA) who can't afford the drugs. Never mind our law enforcement agencies leaning on Canada to clamp down on the people from the USA who cross the border to get the drugs they need at a price they can afford. Just look at the millions in Africa dying of AIDS. At international AIDS conferences, our country, our democratic leaders who represent us, have to stand up and say that it's important that American intellectual property be protected. We can't give the drugs away, we can't just allow anybody who can put together a production line to make them. (Which itself can be expensive, but much less than what you pay when you're also paying the patent.) So as to protect our precious intellectual property, we have to argue to the world that it's better to let the poor people of poor countries die. Is this really what we as a nation want to be standing up to the world and saying?
Fine, you will object, I've got my head in the clouds. Developing drugs is expensive. Without the patent protection that allows companies to get a return on their investment, there never would have been the investment in the first place. If I eliminate drug patents, I will also eliminate all the new drugs I was trying to make afforadable, the argument will go. Well, maybe, but it's not so obvious to me. What is obvious is that the current system is both untenable and immoral, and so therefore we have to ask what else we can do. Consider the goverment investing much more heavily in health research than it does now. More government spending? Maybe-- we should find out if that spending would really be that much more once we factor in the savings that will come from the much cheaper drugs our federal health care programs will be purchasing. Additionally, I believe that already right now the government funds a fair amount of drug research, including some for drugs that end up patented. Given the ills of the current system, we have ask if something else can be done.
Unfortunately, we won't. Pharmaceutical companies are rich, and thus highly influential. Plus, I'm talking about killing them; not the researchers, not the people doing the valuable work, but I am talking about removing the ability for those who aren't actually doing the work to profit from us. (Obviously, the drug research is important, so any replacement system would have to have a way to employ and pay those who are actually developing the new drugs.) And it goes deeper than that; it's all of us with our mutual funds heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies. Killing drug patents would probably send our country into a crushing recession for several years as all of those fund tanked. But I sincerely believe that if done right, the country that emerged out of the other end would both be more economically sound and more moral.
In the mean time, drug costs will continue to spiral upward, more and more people are going to have a harder and harder time affording health care, and our leaders are going to have to argue to the world that the crucial interests American economy require us to allow people in other unimportant countries to die of various diseases.
-Rob
Re:This is not like software (Score:2, Insightful)
(REALITY check - will you sacrifice your life for other's? I don't.)
Closely guarded secret: in this case a good thing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think about why we had the problem with antibiotic-resistant staph in the first place: overuse of antibiotics. While in the old days antibiotics where reserved for serious diseases, nowadays, they are prescribed for the smallest flu and the faintest cough.
Keeping this new wonder medicine patented will ensure that it will stay expensive enough that it will only be used when really needed. Or else we might get some Antibiotic resistant staph antibiotic antibiotic resistant staph...
Re:High Price = It Will Work Better (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Drug patents worse than software patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice way to shrug off the core of the problem. Your rant is pretty much all fluff if you don't even address the issue. Yes, we all know that people not getting drugs to cure disease is bad. That's obvious. Any suggestions?
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:3, Insightful)
The optimal word here is discover, not create. There are restrictions, in some countries, on patenting something which occurs in nature or a natural process.
e.g. I find an algae growing in a particular pond which clears up a skin rash. I take this algae to my lab, and perform some study on how it reacts with the affliction and whether it has any really bad side effects (like the rash is actually my immune system fighting some fungus, the algae has a narcotic affect on the immune cells and the fungus left free starts to eat my skin cells) If it all turns out great, I apply for patents for such clever things as:
Process: Place algae in water, under light, feed certain organic solutions, remove algae, dry, mix with mineral oil as a salve, bottle, good for 6 months.
Patents barring encroachment of genetic engineering other, similar algae to produce the same effect.
Wait until the FDA approval. (Score:5, Insightful)
So treat this more as a press release, less as a scientific discovery until the peer reviewed articles and FDA approval phases start.
Niles
Re:"Oh Well"? -- News Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
NEWS FLASH dude,
Composite materials and automotive safety features ARE patented. Have you ever heard of KEVLAR, Air Bags, or Intermitant windshield wipers? All are patented and fit exactly into the catagory that you are whining about. None of them were cheap when they came out (Kevlar still isn't) but the money made by the people who struggled for years to develop them made up for their years of strugle.
Now, those things are available. They would not have been available without the years of development that was done in the hopes of turning a profit. Soon (if the hype is true) this new drug will be available; At first to those who can afford to pay a premium, then to the masses once the ecomonies of scale are realized in its manufacture. Just like with airplane wings and car safety devices!
Re:Patenting.. (Score:3, Insightful)
What the fuck, just because it's highly visible and currently kills 100% of it's victims, just that *one* would be wrong to abuse?
Pardon my soapbox, but I find any abuse of patents by pharmaceuticals to price fix or price jack the cost of their life-saving prescription medications to be completely and utterly offensive.
In a few years, I'm sure more and more antibiotic resistant strains of bacterium are going to start popping up, with dire consequences for people in hospitals. I, for one, would not want someone in my family going under the knife, perhaps contracting a resistant staph infection and dying because of some bio-pharm's goddamned patent.
Sure, they have every right to recompense for their research dollars, salaries, etc... but you know, as do I, that the patents will be used as a thin veil over corporate greed.
IMO. YMMV.
Re:Well, duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
The U.S. is already $300+ billion in the red this year; I doubt we could walk around slinging $700M+ to every drug company that had a nice idea this year. Recouping costs from private markets is a great solution to the problem of driving discovery.
-j
wake up! overuse of antibiotics is our downfall (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, I feel like they filed for a patent to save humanity from itself. We as a species are overusing antibiotics. They don't just go away when they exit our bodies, or when the pills, cleaners, feed and fertilizer adjuncts expire. They wash out into the ecosystem where they definitely kill a lot of bacteria... but this is the dark point.
They get weakened and find a culture that has mutated, or is ready to mutate - and it survives. Not only does it live on, but it thrives because it's competition has been wiped out.
Now when that super-bug comes back to knock on your door, it laughs at your antibiotic treatments.
I would prefer to have a certain class of treatment guarded behind intellectual property laws. I would prefer to see doses of that treatment be rather expensive, so that Joe Sixpack isn't sprinkling it on his lawn, and flooding his watershed with the substance - almost dredging out recruits for the next generation of biowars.
Instead, it should be reserved for last-case scenarios, and applied in surgical strike fashion.
Re:Patents are bad for society (Score:5, Insightful)
"We go for whatever we think is likely to be of interest. There are certain sites to look for -- basically it's down to experience."
If it is wrong to patent materials obtained in this manner there is an easy solution. Why don't you go beachcombing for the cure to the next big disease and release the rights to the world at large.
Oh wait, you don't have millions of dollars to blow scouring the world for pools of slime that probably don't contain anything, but which might contain the cure for AIDS? Neither do these guys - hence the patent...
If the person who discovered penicillin patented it, where would medicine be today?
Just where we are now - patents only last about 10 years after the product is developed enough to relase...
overuse, resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't condone price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry, but if this product is expensive and it prompts doctors to use it as a last resort, then it certainly will forstall the day when natural selection delivers us bacteria that are resistant to it.
Re:Patenting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you're saying it's immoral for you to try to prevent someone else from stealing your method to cure the disease and giving it to the sick person for free.
So why would you spend any time and effort to find that cure in the first place?
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess having a bunch of scientists on the payroll travelling around the world searching, testing, developing methods to mass produce it, doing clinical trials, seeking FDA approval, etc. is practically free.
Hell, they probably found it in the first rock pool that they looked in.
Sounds like maybe I should get into this easy low risk business. Sounds like an easy way to make the big bucks.
All kidding aside, somebody has to front the money for this research and it is very expensive and very risky. It is not uncommon to spend 10's of millions of dollars and never see a dime in return. When they do find something, they have to make enough profit off of it to make up for money they lost on all of the things that didn't work out. They also have to be able to invest in the research to find more products.
Re:Patenting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This stuff isn't like coming up with an idea in computer technology where it mostly requires a lightbulb to appear over your head for a really good product to be invented, you see, in medical research, it's not about being able to come up with good ideas, those are easy, such as "AIDS cure" and "Cancer cure," it's trying mostly random things, fueled by only minor insight, and many years of trial and error to come upon something truly useful.
I'm not sure what the regulatory process is behind something like a bacterial antibody is, but if it's anything like drug research, once it's discovered, you're looking at another 10+ years of preclinical and clinical trials. Literally billions of dollars must be invested before joe consumer can use it. And that's for a successful run. There are drugs that make it to the end of 10 year trials, and fail, with billions going down the drain.
*THIS* is what you pay for, not the manufacturing cost.
Re:And they shouldn't make money why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that I can develop C code using my $400 PC running linux and gcc. The folks who developed gcc probably had to use $200 PCs and a $1000 compiler package. Still, it is a one time expense, after that you are just donating your time.
Analyzing soil samples for antibiotic compounds requires a lab outfitted with safety features (so you don't burn down your house or breath in cancer-causing fumes), equipment (like a $50,000 HPLC or GC-MS), reagents (culture media, chemicals, etc), disposal costs (I hope you don't plan on dumping said chemicals down the drain), etc. The cost of operating a lab is quite substantial - even in academia where worker safety isn't as big a priority. To run a lab you have to have money. If you have money, that also means that at any given time somebody is trying to sue you. (There would be suits against every open source developer out there whose code crashed and caused a lost day's work - but most of these developers don't have substantial assets to go after (compared to a corporation).)
In short, developing drugs isn't something you do in your garage...
Then we get to testing. At first you have a compound that kills Staph in a tube while presumably not killing human cells in a tube. But then again, VX probably doesn't kill human cells in a tube either (it kills nerves, and cultured cells don't have those). Now you need to shoot this stuff into a person and see what happens. Anyone want to sign up for beta-testing the latest open-source injection?
I'm all for charity-based research to benefit the general public, but a big part of the reason that drugs are expensive is because they aren't cheap to discover.
Free software works because the main cost in software development is the programmer's time. In free software this is typically donated. If profit is sought it is in services.
For drugs, there are other substantial costs involved (though the developer's time is still a big one). Just donating time doesn't get you much. The services side of things is already cornered by doctors, who have much different qualifications than the guys in the lab developing the product.
Life Saving Patent (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing we want is for this to become cheap and widely available. It will have to be expensive because we don't want anyone to get it until there it is proven that a particular case of MRSA is resistant to all existing antibiotics. And then, we only want it given on those particular cases. Thus, the costs of having found it, which could have been in the billions since its the cost of every project looking for naturally occurring drugs divided by the number of successes, and the cost of figuring out how to cultivate it, purify it, and of testing it all have to be defrayed against (hopefully) no more than a few thousands of cases.
Its the fact that the antibiotics are too widely and easily available today that has caused this crisis. Now that a possible way out has been discovered, you propose to destroy it by making it cheap and widely available. Will we ever learn our lessons?
Just bathe in a rock pool after a major surgery... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not *entirely* their fault (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say I'm mostly (but not entirely) on the Pharmecuticals side on this issue. You are forgetting a few things
1) the manufacturing of these drugs *once you know how* is generally pretty cheap & easy to do.
2) Discovering these drugs in the first place is the product of some very serious, long-term, hard and *expensive* science.
3) Often finding a way to turn a discovery like this into a drug that is fit for human consumption is perhaps even more difficult and *expensive* - Penicillin was discovered in 1929 but it wasn't until 1945 that someone figured out how to use it as a drug. It usually takes several years of *very expensive* research before they figure out how to use a discovery like this as a drug.
4) Once they have a drug it takes several years of difficult and *very expensive* trials to prove it's effectiveness & safety to the FDA
5) Not all of their expensive initial research, & expensive development of drugs end up being anything.
6) The whole time they've been doing this their patent has been active and ticking down, they have a few years left in their patent to make back their enormous investment. (though they *may/may not* be able to get a patent extension that compensates them for the time it takes to get FDA approval. So, they may get at best 17 years to get a return on their investment or if they fail to get an extension they may have only a couple of years.
7) They are making drugs there is a *huge* risk even after years of *expensive* research and getting FDA approval that a drug may do nasty things to the user over the long term or to a tiny fraction of the population - the result could be lawsuits that costs BILLIONS. It is important to note that this harm doesn't have to be proven scientifically it has to be "proven" in a court of law - One scientist with a pet theory as an expert witness and a handful (out of millions) that have some unexplained syndrome and all the profits from all the drugs produced by hundreds of scientists over dozens of years may end up in the pockets of a few dozen lawyers that "worked" for at most four or five years to "earn" it.
The response to all this is that Pharmecutical companies are *very* profitable - true but they are engaged in a fairly risky investment as a matter of economics high risk has to be balanced with high rewards, otherwise the investment goes elsewhere. If they operated without any profit at all the drugs would be roughly 8-25% less (looking at last years profits vs. revenues) but that obviously woudn't take into account any risks or explain why anyone would bother to undertake the years of research outside of pure altruism - a fine sentiment but not that great as a motivator.
The other response is "if it's a life saving drug it's morally wrong to profit from it". My response to those folks is to ask them if they are willing to make such huge investments themselves without profiting from them. Would YOU be willing to go to school, get an advanced chemistry degree, spend decades of research into the slime floating around rock pools and NOT GET PAID for it.
Re:Closely guarded secret: in this case a good thi (Score:3, Insightful)
A good one.
But when push come to shove this will probably mean that the rich get the cure and the poor (as usual) gets shafted.
There's huge potential for abuse in the patent system.
I hope that won't be the case here.
But misuse of antibiotics also ranks quite high on the 'threats to mankind' list.
This patent properly handled could be a good thing.
Re:Patenting.. (Score:1, Insightful)
The reality in pharmaceuticals (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, it comes as absolutely NO suprise that they are keeping this close to heart. These people keep their birthdates and surnames close to heart. The only place you can possibly find a higher level of paranoia is probably at the annual DefCon.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry NEEDS TO TAKE OUT PATENTS TO SURVIVE.
Developing one new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars. If the drug turns out to be a complete failure near the end of the project (i.e. clinical testing on animals/humans), then they've wasted those hundreds of millions of dollars. That means they have to make a decent profit on their successes, otherwise one or two failures would send them straight out of business.
If they didn't patent and protect their discoveries that would mean some other company could just start producing the drug themselves, and as they didn't spend all that money on developing it, competitive pricing is not exactly a problem and again the inventor is driven out of business.
Either have your government use some of your tax money to fund this sort of research, or just accept the facts:
1. We need medicine.
2. Medicine is insanely expensive to develop.
3. That means it will eventually cost you.
All the people that are nagging on about how "all medicine should be freely available to everyone around the world", please take a moment and understand that if it was free then there wouldn't be any medicine in the first place. Yes the pharmaceutical industry does make a good profit, but it's needed to finance the failures.
We don't cure ANYTHING (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if one accepts the argument that the pace of medical progress has slowed, that's not necessarily an argument against capitalism. Maybe the initial discoveries were easier? We've been working on cancer for most of this century, but most of the progress has been made recently, not back in the early days (when you believe things were done right). In fact, as the price of research becomes higher, it becomes all the more important that the medical companies have a way to make back their investment.
R&D is not free. Even if the government paid for it, people would still have to bear the cost. Instead of people who actually require the medicine having to pay, the entire taxpaying population would pay. It's up to you to decide which is more fair. Of course, another big downside of government sponsored R&D is that it would be politicized. Imagine all the fun if our elected officials had/got to decide which diseases were the important ones. We'd probably spend all our money on Alzheimer's, as the baby boomers get older.
In short, Chris Rock is full of shit.
Re:An new antibiotic? How about a new approach (Score:2, Insightful)
Woah there.. Hold on, professor.
Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. They infect the bacterial cell and use it to multiply. There are many different kinds of bacteriophages and they infect bacteria in different ways. A virus is a peice of RNA inside a coating. It is not alive, and it does not eat bacteria. Like any virus, it uses the host cell to reproduce more virus.
And it's also not 100% effective against bacteria. Like an antibiotic, some bacterial cells will mutate and become resistant to the virus. Considering how many billion times the cells divide, one mutation in a million can result in possible resistance traits.
Bacteriophage development is not that simple either. Its possible to isolate a bacteriophage, but since it does not reproduce without the aide of a host cell (which it will destroy), its kind of difficult to get it to multiply and hence mutate into a form thats more virulent.
Can't make any money out of it?!!?
Makes you think.
It makes me wonder why people would imply such simple solutions to a complex problem without understanding it first.
Re:An new antibiotic? How about a new approach (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? If it's so "simple," then that implies cheap. If it's cheap, there's little R&D to recoup. If it's patentable (as you implied with your line about the Russians. I'm not sure why the USSR cared about American patents anyway, but I'll let that slide), one can make a profit, quickly recouping R&D costs.
Assuming the article you read wasn't just totally full of shit, there could be another reason why it's not profitable. There simply aren't that many antibiotic immune bacteria. Any new drug would almost certainly be orders of magnitude more expensive during the patent period than generic antibiotics, and there's very little that can't be cured with the right antibiotic at the right dosage. If antibiotic immune bacteria become more common, then people will pay a premium for bacteriophage based medicine, because there will be no alternative. Then it will become profitable.
Re:Patenting.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is: what are the rights of the producers of a given drug (bridge, piece of software, etc.)?
The only answer appropriate to a free society is: they can do with their product exactly as they see fit, so long as they are not infringing the legitimate rights of others in the process. (And, to claim that one of the "legitimate rights of others" is for free/cheap/easy access to this product is to annihilate the concept of rights per se.)
To summarize: if you want to give away the drug you develop for free "so that people won't suffer", noone should be able to prevent you. But, neither should you, or the majority, or the dictator, or whomever, have the right to force someone else to provide their drug on any other terms than they are willing.
Re:One of the best ways to make money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Larger, more prestigious hospitals have to keep in much closer touch with research (often being research-oriented themselves) and tend to be more aware of the problems of antibiotic abuse.
Complex, rare antibiotics like this should not be needed - at least not yet.
AWESOME! (Score:3, Insightful)
God, I *really* hope this is used only as a last ditch effort and is used correctly. It makes me ill when a doctor offers me an antibiotic for a viral infection.
The Government will/must step up... (Score:2, Insightful)
"we do nothing anything inexpensively; we are not a University" I was warned; the more expensive and shiny the better. I hated the culture and left it, the Republican-ish stewardship and snobbery; even the locals hate you if they know you are part of "that company".
As in other *required* areas of our life/lifestyle, the government(s) will be forced to take over or regulate this burden; society cannot afford to fund hyper-educated, top heavy, and expensive endeavors ala space shuttle, orphaned drugs, our highway system, etc.
Philosphy Street... (Score:3, Insightful)
This rapidly becomes a matter of taste in morals and what a society should allow or does allow in terms of ethics.
The way pharmaceutical companies operate in many cases, is analogous to blackmail: a man walks up to a woman whose husband has a violent temper. He tells her that he has put them in a place where her husband is bound to find them very soon unless he gives her all the money she can beg, borrow or steal.
Like someone with a fatal illness, the woman has very little time to respond and has to put many of her resources into providing for her tormentor's profit.
One man is a filthy criminal. The other is a corporate hero.
It is interesting to note that when there is a sufficient pressure of national interest, governments lesson or remove the power of companies and individuals to derive profit from their inventions (see the conflict between the Wright Brothers and the Inventor Curtis over the aileron at the start of the first World War).
The key question which is only resolved by the political will of the people in control is: 'at what point do the interests of the many (alleviation of suffering, survival ), outweigh the interests of corporations and entrepreneurs?'
It's an ugly question. Not everyone has the stomach to intellectualize people dying of infection by a resistant strain so they can charge $100 for antibiotics instead of $10 but this is what drug companies are all about.
Re:One of the best ways to make money... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd do your research, as opposed to the kneejerk disgust with doctors many Americans have developed, the predominant cause of antibiotic resistance is: LIVESTOCK!
WHAT?!?
Yes, A MAJOR cause of antibiotic resistance is the highly common practice of farmers mixing antibiotics with their feed. A steady dose of antibiotics helps the animals spare some energy for getting fat and happy, instead of fighting off common infections, which means more meat for the farmers to sell. A hell of a lot more antibiotics get used by dairy cattle than by snot-nosed five-year-olds, exposing a lot more bugs to antibiotics than they ever could. As a mater of fact, vancomycin, one of the last, great "superantibiotics," capable of taking out MRSA, (sometimes called a "flesh-eating" bacteria) is gonna be undermined soon, because one of the "feed supplements" being used is very similar in structure and function to Vanco.
Many doctors are trying hard to conserve the "big gun" antibiotics, which are HELLA expensive, for when they're actually needed, but that's occuring more and more. Plus, the fact that patients often demand an antibiotic when they've got a cold (which is a virus, and doesn't get TOUCHED by even the best antibiotic), and you've got a tragedy in the making.
Not flaming, not trolling, just one Medical Student's experience.
private drug development is not efficient (Score:3, Insightful)
Another problem with private development of drugs is that market forces cause the development of the wrong kinds of drugs: you get dozens of redundant designer anti-allergy drugs, but less common diseases don't get addressed.
Research is something the government has demonstrated they are good and efficient at. And, in fact, a lot of private drug research is still partially supported by the government anyway.
Re:Patenting.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, much of the research pharmacutical companies do is proving drugs are safe and they do indeed work. This process is extremely time consuming and costly. I resently posted on this very topic here [slashdot.org].
pasted below is what I said in the link, perhaps it will shed some light onto why drug companies have to do much of there own research, even if they start out on publicly funded research.
puck
Let me start by saying I am not an expert on the matter, but I believe I have more experience with this than most people here. I am almost a doctor and did some research at Monsanto doing basic research to develop new drugs.
I can say fairly confidently your theory, at least in the pharmacutical business, is mostly wrong. Relatively speaking, developing the process to manufactor drugs is cheap. Once a compound had been identified, its not very hard to make it. The hard part in the drug business is *finding* new compounds, proving they are relatively *safe*, and finally proving they are actually *efficatious*. This is a very long and hard trail.
Generally, one first starts by identifying compounds that have a desired property (they inhibit a certain enzyme or activate a cerain receptor for example). Candidate compounds are then tested for toxic effects to cells in petri dishes. From this several candidates move onto ex-vivo experiments or straight to animal studies. So far you've spent tons and there is no guarentee you'll get anything. Now you need to find a good animal model for the process you are interested in. You can easily spend a few millions on the animal studies while testing a compound or two. This process can be as short as a year if you get damn lucky.
Moving on, you find one of the compounds seems to do what you want and without any bad effects. You're lucky but not done. It only gets more expensive. Now a large human study must be done to prove safey (ie. no bad effects in humans). So that study goes on for a year or two and again we can breath a sigh of relief, its not hurting anyone. Still not done yet, though. Another study must be carried out on humans to determine efficacy. We are talking a large multicenter study blinded and randomized comparing our new drug with placebo or another drug. These studies cost many millions of dollars and typically take years to carry out. If the company is lucky, the drug works and they cash in and milk the drug for what it is worth. By far this is the exception, now the rule as many, many compounds to do pass all these 'tests'. Basically, it is a long and risky process with absolutely no guarentee of success.
So, anyway, my point is that the cost is mostly not in making the drug. An extemely larger amount of money and effort goes into reseach to prove safty and efficacy of the drug after screening and animal studies that are expensive as well.
It would be grossly unfair to expect a single company to bare these costs only to have other companies copy the drug after it has been proven safe and effective.
Do I side completely with drug companies? hardly. But they do have some valid points.
puck