Slashing Cost Of Drugs January 2, 2007
Posted by Confused in Health, Innovation.4 comments
One of the biggest problems which developing nations face is the high cost of drugs. The patents are generally held by giant Western pharmaceutical companies who exploit their monopoly status to drive up prices. African nations have faced prohibhitive costs with H.I.V drugs and India will face the same challenges as it completes the change from a regime of process patents to product patents. Can this help?
Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill. Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model “ethical pharmaceuticals”. [link]
The crucial question here is the level of innovation. Could the two professors have ‘invented’ their new drug without the basic molecular structure developed by the pharmaceutical companies? Developing new drugs costs hundreds of millions of dollars simply because a lot of compounds don’t come through trials, they might be actually show promise in animal trials but fail the human ones. So a company developing a successful drug not only attempts to recoup the cost of development of that particular drug but also of those compunds which failed. I remember that an Indian pharmaceutical company, Dr. Reddy’s lab had developed a potentially winning compound which it preferred to sell to an American company rather than take the risk of going through a clinical trial. The cost of failure was potentially so high that it could have put Dr. Reddy out of business.
Patents exist so that the drug companies can recover their investments and make profits, a part of which, at least theoretically, would be invested towards developing new drugs. Disrupting this cycle of innovation can have potentially disastrous effects.
It would of course be very gratifying if researchers like professor Shaunak can actually lower the cost of developing new drugs. Has that happened in this case? The jury is still out on that.
(link via n)
