Never mind non-practicing entities for software patents, but surely for patents on medicine keeping them valid when no one is making any is entirely bogus and not deserving of legal protection?
If you invalidate people’s patents for trying to sell their drug at a price high enough to recover R&D costs, they’ll just stop doing R&D for any drugs that will have niche target populations.
This isn't the same though, this is invalidating patents for drugs that have been developed that no one is producing anymore.
Patent protection makes sense to inventivize development and production. In this case development already happened and only production stopped. So it doesn't make sense to uphold this patent.
If losing your patents in a position like this is a possible outcome, it changes the investment calculus. As it stands, there’s still the possibility that administrations or laws will change and governments or insurance companies will come around to wanting to buy it at a price that recovers the investment, or some other company will believe that they can persuade buyers to buy at a worthwhile price and buy the patents or the production rights off of the current owners. Or maybe some other company will profitably deploy a derivative technology and they can sue to recover some of their investment. For all of these reasons the patents and trade secrets are still worth something. If finding yourself in this position means that you are stripped of your patents and receive nothing, that makes drug R&D an even riskier investment proposition. Being stripped of patents by the government after having bankrolled clinical trials because the government refused to pay the price required to recover the investment would be a brazen show of bad faith and a real stab in the back. The patents will expire in a decade or so anyway, do we really need the government to go out of its way to screw these people out of their last possibility of making back some of the money they spent on this socially valuable work? If we think that it’s so important that this treatment be made immediately available to people at a low price, maybe the government should buy the patents early for the several hundred million dollars that they cost to produce?
I don't want to sound like a communist but it's not people who are holding patents and funding research. Usually research is funded by governments by subsidizing universities and research institutions or by companies.
So we can have governments continuing to subsidize research, but forbid universities and research institutions to sell the rights to only one company.
In the example we’re talking about here in the article, university research generated the treatment itself, and then a pharmaceutical company spent hundred of millions of dollars conducting clinical trials and bringing the drug to market, including wrangling with regulators and lobbying EU politicians directly to get acceptance of the safety and efficacy of the treatment in spite of the small sample size of the trials due to the extreme rarity of people with this disorder.
So the question of who did the initial research and who funded it isn’t really important to the question of whether invalidating patents left and right will negatively impact the rate at which new drugs are brought to market.
If the government wants the company’s patents and distribution rights, at this point I’m sure they’d be willing to sell everything over to the government at cost. Clearly no government is interested in buying the rights for $200M, any more than they are interested in buying doses for $1M each. The company that brought this treatment to market has clearly gotten utterly screwed here, and the nature of the comments on the article suggest that a lot of people here are disappointed that no governments have intervened to screw them even more for the audacity of thinking that they should be compensated for their work.
Perhaps the lesson here is that maybe seizing their parents for not selling their treatment at a loss isn’t actually a bad idea. Maybe there’s no risk of discouraging pharmaceutical companies from developing expensive treatments for niche conditions, since it’s already clearly a terrible idea, and companies already won’t be making the mistake of ever doing it again.
India has been doing this for decades. Somehow the global pharmaceutical industry didn't collapse despite of Indian drugs being exported for very cheap.
It's just a lie, one of very many we tell ourselves.
The lie people tell themselves is that because India does it, everyone could do it without disrupting the rate at which new drugs are researched and brought to market.
As I’ve discussed in other comments, this is why pharma companies have to recover their entire investment off of sales in the first world. The rest of the world is never going to buy their drugs at a price that would make the R&D spending worthwhile. This is why companies sell their drugs for much cheaper in countries where incomes are much lower, and also why drugs produced and sold cheaply in other countries generally can’t be legally imported into the United States. It’s also why claims that drug prices could be lowered in the United States by importing them from countries where they are sold more cheaply are fundamentally ridiculous. The reason drug prices are high in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe is that they are subsidizing the rest of the world by doing substantially the entirety of pharmaceutical R&D spending in the world.
"Peter Bach, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and his colleagues compared prices of the top 20 best-selling drugs in the United States to the prices in Europe and Canada. They found that the cumulative revenue from the price difference on just these 20 drugs more than covers all the drug research and development costs conducted by the 15 drug companies that make those drugs—and then some"
"To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion."
