India Launches Open Source Drug Discovery 30
sas-dot writes "India today launched a unique collaborative programme to discover drugs for infectious diseases common to the developing countries. The 'Open Source Drug Discovery' (OSDD) programme, launched by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), aims to build a consortium of global researchers and bypass the patent regime, which makes drugs expensive." Of course, all those pesky research, development and liability costs help, too.
Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
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Hopefully OSSD will soon find a cure for braindead first posts . . . .
1. Ask OSSD for a research grant
2. Suggest hiding new stories fron non-logged in users for 10 minutes
3. ???
4. Profit!
Twice as much on marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds [sciencedaily.com], Jan. 7, 2008
Isn't that the strangest thing going? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Twice as much on marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.
Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States [plosjournals.org]
I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.
They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.
The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.
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Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.
Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
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Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.
Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They use
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And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples.
If the patient has no money then they get virtually all costs back from our (Belgian) national healthcare system. Promotional samples don't even register as a blip on the radar when tackling healthcare challenges faced by "patients with no money". Trying to dress this up as some form of socially responsible charity is, as you like to say, disingenuous.
Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate)
Oh, please. Companies don't give stuff away to make things cheaper. That's all calculated into the price of the products they sell.
Obviously, medicins that ar
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For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").
They only cited two studies in calculating their number. [plosjournals.org] And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.
Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the co
Sounds like a good idea, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
How it works [osdd.net]
It seems to me that the project could be leeched off of fairly easily. E.g., at work package 10.
Other than that, it is the inevitable result of high prices and monopolies. Open source, coops, public libraries; they all exist to let a larger group of people get access to limited resources for less. That's an interesting article.
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If it did, however, i'd expect a group of hundreds of thousands of cancer, AIDS, and other terminal illness patients who can't afford these potentially life-saving drugs to mob the CEO's of each pharmaceutical company which did.
I know if I was going to die because some multi-billionnaire wanted a 5% increase on his bonus mooched research from a body designed to help those in exactly that situation, AND THEN STOPPED THAT VERY BODY PRODUCING THE DRUG BY PATENTING THE CHEMCAL, i'd be a
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Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...
The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.
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What I think would need to happen, is for the patent office to recognize that the molecule is only unique with respect to other molecules. I.e., it was built from a specification,
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Expect the first patent held by this F/OSD body held under a GPL-esque license to be contested in court by EVERY drug company. One after another, until every single penny is spent on legal defense.
I envisage a Pharmaceutical Industry Ass. of America in the making.
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Yes, they need something GPL-like to prevent big corps from taking their research, making a slight tweak and patenting the result...
The difference is that knowledge is not a limited resource, it is only artificially limited by these large corps and the laws they have bought and paid for.
They do this already. A new drug is released, and 7 (?) years later, when the generic hits the shelves, the original company comes out with the 12 hour time release version. 7 years later, when the generic 12 hour time release comes out, the original company releases the 24 hour time release. There is no reason to not sell the 24 hour time release from day one except to stretch out the patents.
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Yes but mostly No (Score:3, Informative)
Also, India is pro-patent when it comes to pharmaceuticals. So it is just as likely that Indian companies will leech off this research. Remember that it is the actual drug molecule that is patented.
Take for example, escitalopram and citalopram, escitalopram
I could go for some open source drugs... (Score:1, Funny)
DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
It will be interesting to see how the multinational drug rights management folks can kibosh this. U.N. sanctions?
Clinical (Score:2, Interesting)
For development, yes, this might work. However, much of the cost in bringing a drug to market (not marketting it, just getting it ready) is in the clinical studies side. You have to buy the animals to test it in, you have to pay people to test it in safety studies and efficacy studies, plus the doctors and physicians to monitor them over long periods of time. etc..
Meanwhile, a company pours money into optimizing the production strain; fine-tuning the media and culturing methods (assuming biologics rather th
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Yeah, but the standard practice for the tests are a bureaucrat's wet dream and anybody else's nightmare.
Anyway... if India really wanted to help their poor, instead of trying to develop their own Big Pharma... They'd just say "We just don't recognize patent protection on drugs and we WILL produce them cheap and sell them for peanuts to our starving masses, so PLEASE go on disclosing how to make them in PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE patents, and FUCK your racketeering bottom line"
Now THAT would send a message. And Big
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About the effectiveness of cow dung for haemorrages and that of ground tiger dicks for aphrodisiacs? Yeah, you go develop an industry on that.
Oh wait...
Open Source? Not Really. (Score:1)
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