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Comment by NeutronBoy | Hacker News Reader

> since the patent protection is involved

While I'm no fan of software patents, why would I spend billions developing a new drug when I can wait for somebody else to do it, then just copy it?

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Why should $30.9bn of tax money be infused to an industry if the public don't gain any benefits from it?

I am all for a fair market where those who spend money on development can recoup costs, but the current system is a bit silly. First they get to use tax funded research for free, then get extra funds from NiH, then they demand 20 years monopoly with some extra years of exclusivity added from doing test trials. And when that is done, try some Evergreening schemes to extend exclusivity into infinity.

The people who are hurt by all this also just happens to be sick people, people who die because they can only afford a inferior treatment. It things like this that calls for patent reforms so the public can get what it pays for, and where investing into medical research could become a low risk/low reward instead of high risk/high reward system.

Because these drugs are mostly monoclonal antibodies, you have to actually develop your own. You can work out what the target is, but because the antibody has extremely high specificity for a specific target, and is high molecular weight, you can't just synthesise it, you need to grow it (An absolutely fascinating process in and of itself)

There have been examples of other drug companies targeting the same target as an existing high value monoclonal antibody drug, however I am aware of at least one example where the 'knockoff' monoclonal antibody actually had harmful effects compared with the original.

The only way you can actually copy the drug is to steal a cell from their lineage and produce your own

I am interested to learn about the case with the knockoff having harmful effects. Could you guide me in the right direction?

Off the top of my head it was a VEGF antagonist, so avastin knockoff. I'll try dig up the paper when I'm off mobile

So I have just spent about half an hour looking.

I honestly can't remember where this knowledge comes from. My feeling is i learned it on my oncology term 12 months ago. It may have even been a ipilimumab biosimilar. Unfortunately google is mostly saturated with success stories and papers relating to monoclonal antibodies and wherever I heard about the writeup of the failure has vanished into the nether-regions of google.

Apologies. If anything comes up, put a contact email in your details and i'll reach out to you.

And why spend billions developing a new drug when you can just tweak an existing one that's about to fall out of patent and then bribe doctors, or fund dubious studies, to encourage them to use the "new" patent-protected one? If patents = billions then people will optimise for patents, not cures.

I'm not against drug patents, I am only stating that they prevent the drug market from being a free market by a considerable margin.

There are proposed models that would reward a company for developing a drug for a specific purpose. It would allow them to recoup a part of their R&D up front. Rewards could be offered by the government, NGOs or insurance companies. Would also help with the development of drugs for rare conditions that are currently not worth the research costs.

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