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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening.

There are many such examples. Here’s one from my life: when I was in the pharmaceutical business one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease. He and a couple of others tried it on themselves. We could have patented it and run it through clinical trials, but it was something any compounding pharmacist could have whipped up so such a patent would have been worthless. We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program. Instead there are marketed, less effective products on the market.

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Have you written about this anywhere? I'm curious what common disease could be cured in the manner you described. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is already picked clean in the pharma industry.

It was using urea to fight topical fungal infections (anti fungal drugs are typically quite toxic). The mechanism of action has been well known for decades; what the folks came us with was a formulation that got the dosage high enough without causing damage. It was easily whipped up in the lab but I don’t remember the details. Any notes from this would be long gone as this was over a decade ago and the company has been sold and surely any paper lab notebooks are buried and forgotten.

So the chemist and his friend had the exact same disease and it was successfully treated and they wouldn't release it because it could be made by someone else? Uh a recipe can be patented and that protects it from being sold. Compounding pharmacies can't magically ignore those patents if they don't want to get sued into oblivion or lose their license. I'm kind of skeptical of your story, sorry.

It’s not really practical to sue a thousand small businesses — you might not even hear about them. And anyway it’s better to go after a product with a protected high margin than try to fight where somebody else can attack your margin.

BTW it wasn’t “the chemist and his friend” — that would have been a crime. It was a few chemists in the company dosing themselves — also technically illegal but done all the time and generally excused if it’s a trivial scale and disclosed in your filings.

Feel free to be skeptical but those are the business issues.

>> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. >There are many such examples... one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease... We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program.

It's understandable that a startup could not invest further in something they can't sell. The problem seems therefor deeper than a general invocation of 'free markets'.

Perhaps the real problem is that apparently there was no way or perhaps incentive to publish the result without an expensive full study. Had the idea been published perhaps someone else would have picked it up. Would the recent fashion of preprints have helped?

Or maybe the problem is that pharmaceutical business/research income depends on patents alone, and we should have some form of public investment which guaranteed profits for development of treatments regardless of patents?

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