1. Research does not get funded unless there is a commercial market for the drug. This leads to overfunding of maintenance treatments of chronic diseases like diabetes, because they are widespread and never really go away. Meanwhile, the system does not incentivize investment in things like antibiotics (because the next wide-spectrum antibiotic that gets developed will likely be force-licensed for public health interests).
2. For the vast majority of life-threatening diseases that anyone is likely to catch, the most effective drugs are already off-patent. Unless you can significantly improve outcomes, how can you compete with a generic that works 95% as well as your new drug?
3. The only country currently willing to pay sticker price for pharmaceuticals is the US. Every other country negotiates prices down to a fraction of what the US pays. The idea of a month worth of pills costing $400 is unheard of outside the US. So US citizens are either directly subsidizing the cheap drugs for the rest of the world, or we're getting taken for a ride.
4. The majority of the cost of developing a drug comes in the clinical trial phases. This cost is the same for any drug -- and most of this is marketing budget. Studies are designed to have specific outcomes so they can be listed as bullet points on information sheets given to doctors -- doctors are smart, but they're busy, so if you can do a study saying that "outcomes in high-risk patients were improved by 30% over the leading treatment", the doctors will never look to see what high-risk patients means, whether the study was done correctly, or even what an improved outcome looks like for those patients. Never mind you may have done the study 8 times and this outcome was only observed once.
Pharma is broken. Our current pharma industry is geared towards "lifecycle" drugs that alleviate symptoms rather than fixing any underlying problems.
the only thing holding the system in place are the patents, not the knowledge.
This is money grab. There is no way to justify it. If they think the money isn't there, they are more than welcome to stop the research.
What's more appropriate to ask though is how do developing/under-developed countries compete with the money spending power of west. Are the poor people forever destined to look for aid from the west? If they ain't creating all the drugs, they ain't creating all the horrible diseases either. Many tribes were perfectly happy and healthy until the intruders affected their ecosystem.
No. That's just your american white guilt playing up.
Drug research takes a long time. The drugs that cause this debate are drugs that the pharmaceutical companies decided to research decades ago, when they seriously expected people would respect intellectual property rights more than human lives.
Now that they know better, they will probably go invent a new Viagra or something instead of inventing something useful which can be prematurely generified for the common good.
Lots of people are already dying of antibiotic resistant bacteria, for example, and that's a problem likely to get worse over time.
EDIT: Not to mention having their own research and development. I bet it's cheaper to research stuff in India, but evil selfish pharma companies don't want to invest in research in countries with poor intellectual properties protection.
You can live a perfectly fine, if frugal, life in India on USD $2 a day, but not if you have to pay for USD $1 tablets.
I thought any lab could do that. Isn't the research part the most difficult and expensive part?
>if a pharma company takes an old drug and a new chemical to it to change its effects slightly, the patent is renewed, and that way it it never actually becomes 'old' enough
I've heard about this happening with 'me-too' drugs and bullshit antidepressants. Does it happen as well with essential life saving medicine?
"The Pharmaceutical industry in India is the world's third-largest in terms of volume and stands 14th in terms of value."
"Indian companies carved a niche in both the Indian and world markets with their expertise in reverse-engineering new processes for manufacturing drugs at low costs."[2]
There is skill involved in reverse-engineering new processes for manufacturing drugs.
Does it happen with essential life saving medicine?
Yes.
"...Glivec, a medicine for chronic myeloid leukemia"[1]
"The Supreme Court defended India’s right to deny patents to incremental improvements. It ruled that Glivec was merely a new form of an older drug and did not constitute a patentable invention. “This is a huge relief,” said Unni Karunakara, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières, which cares for patients in poor countries. Novartis is less pleased, declaring that the ruling “discourages future innovation in India."
Did you previously think pharmaceutical companies care about people's lives more than profit? I'm sorry to disappoint.
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&r...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry_in_Ind...
We need to incentivize research into important medicine (ie antibiotics, or something to actually cure AIDS and malaria for good), which is hard because as soon as they develop something actually useful, people refuse to honor their patents.
That means research into important drugs like antibiotics, HIV and malaria medicine is underfunded.
Ofcourse from the big pharmacy side, the generics represents lost opportunities, they want to make more money.
Well pharma companies tend to spend so much money because they are run very inefficiently in the first place. Plus there's the cost of lobbying...
When a company begins an expensive research project, they don't know beforehand if it will be profitable or not.
If little-to-medium pharma were compensated generously for the risks they take, they would make more research in new drugs, but because the risk is not compensated, only big pharma can afford the research.
It's not like if it weren't for the evil pharma companies, everyone would have access to advanced medicine. Quite the contrary, in fact.
We are not talking about software here. Developing medications requires huge investments in developed countries, and no one will develop in the other countries because there is no patent protection in those countries.