« New Address |
Main
| Think Twice »
March 15, 2005
Back For More
Posted by Derek
Well, I'm back from my undisclosed location, ready to see what's been going on at work the past couple of days. I passed the site on the highway on the way home this evening, so I know that it's at least still there. The side of the building containing my lab was still intact, which is always a good sign.
What passes for normal blogging around here will resume shortly. For now, I wanted to point out this article from Matthew Herper at Forbes, who asks the inflammatory question: "Are Drug Patents Too Short?" His point, a valid one, is that clinical trials have tended to get longer, larger, and more expensive, while patent lifetimes aren't changing. And once a drug is off patent, no company is likely to spend the money to study it with much intensity.
The thing is, a patent extension for drug companies has, as Herper well knows, zero chance of being enacted. There are arguments for and against the idea, but we wouldn't even get that far. The inflatable bats and cream pies would come out immediately, and we'd set in dealing with this issue in the time-honored fashion. . .
The other solution is to make the clinical trials shorter and less painful, which is what the whole biomarker idea is aiming to do. So far, though, there's not much to point at in that field, but these are early days.
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Patents and IP
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Shire's Replagal Problems: An Inside Look?
- › Bungled Structure, And How
- › Roche Closes Nutley, Once Its US R&D Home
- › The Next Five Years in the Drug Industry
- › A Kinase Inhibitor Learns Something New
- › The Good Ol' Friedel-Crafts
- › Merck's Madagascar Marketing Mess
- › Scientific Literacy: Where Do You Stop?
College chemistry, 1983
The 2002 Model
After 10 years of blogging. . .
1. SP on March 16, 2005 8:02 AM writes...
Undisclosed location = ACS conference?
Permalink to Comment2. Derek Lowe on March 16, 2005 9:45 AM writes...
Nah, vacation for a couple of days with the wife and kids. Much, much more entertaining than the ACS meeting, I can tell you. No poster sessions, for one thing.
Permalink to Comment3. Doug Ridgway on March 16, 2005 12:32 PM writes...
Drug companies already receive patent extensions giving credit for period spent in regulatory review up to five years, see eg 35 USC 156 for the US, and similar provisions in other places. Don't these help a bit, or do clinical trials not count as part of the regulatory review?
Permalink to Comment4. jsinger on March 17, 2005 6:11 PM writes...
Don't these help a bit, or do clinical trials not count as part of the regulatory review?
I'm not an authority but my understanding was that they don't.
Permalink to CommentAnyway, here's a proposition: what about extending the pharmaceutical patent term by, say, two years -- in return for giving up additional patents for new indications, combination therapies, etc...?
5. bago on March 18, 2005 5:18 AM writes...
You have no idea how many times I've seen such things programming. One guy tried to re-implement a weak version of the resource manager for his UI code, and someone else drew up a class based representation of xml data by hand,instead of using xsd to automatically generate the several hundred lines of code they cooked up.
Honestly I think there is something to be gained from a fundamentally lay approach to abstract work. If you're lay, you won't want to put with with the redundant and menial work you can use to get an answer, when there's a proper and simple abstract method to reach your goals.
Permalink to Comment6. bago on March 18, 2005 5:19 AM writes...
And by lay I meant lazy. My keyboard died two days ago :/
Permalink to Comment7. spec on March 25, 2005 6:20 PM writes...
It seems at first glance an easy solution would be to grant patent exclusivity for, say 15 years from the date of FDA marketing approval, with no extensions for any reason.
I think that the only losers in this scenario are the lawyers.
Permalink to Comment