Pharmaceutical Patents: A Double Edged Sword

Pharmaceutical Patents: A Double Edged Sword

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning, and opening up the newspaper. As you begin to read, you notice the headline is about a pill just released that eliminates all risk of developing cancer. Would you be thinking about getting your hands on this new pill? I would, and most people would probably agree. So you head to the pharmacy to buy yourself this pill. You walk up to the overtly tall pharmacy counter and take out your wallet to pay for a drug that could save yours and thousands if not millions of other lives. The pharmacist says that you only have to take one pill per month, and you won't ever develop cancer, and asks how many you would like to purchase today. You say twelve, which makes sense; that would cover you for a whole year. Well you must be quite well off because a drug like this brand new on the market would likely cost between one and three thousand dollars a pill. Your total could be thirty six thousand dollars. Pharmaceutical patents need to be shorter in order to help save lives.

If you are like me, there is no way you could afford this bill. This price is a very real estimate. Doctor Kevin E. Noonan Ph.D. wrote about a new drug to help people with Crohn's disease in his article An Uneven Debate on Takings in Pharmaceutical Patent Law from Patentdocs.org and said, "The drug is priced by Abbott Laboratories at a staggering twenty two thousand dollars a year"(3). Even if you found a way to scrounge together that amount, that would only hold you over for a year. The majority of people would not be able to attain this drug. The reason that this drug would be around three thousand dollars per pill is because of pharmaceutical patent laws. Pharmaceutical companies are given seventeen years once they develop a drug to sell and market it alone, with no competitors allowed to make anything like it. During that time, pharmaceutical companies are supposed to be able to make back their research and development costs, as well as make a profit which they use to develop more lifesaving drugs. This concept has worked for a long time, the drug companies ask whatever price they see fit to recover their costs, and after seventeen years generic drug companies can reproduce the drug for pennies on the dollar of what the original company does, and then everyone can have the drug. If you have a deadly disease during that seventeen year period and don't have hundreds of thousands to spend, you could die from a disease that there is a cure for. Doctor Noonan concludes in his article "many patients die every year that could have lived if they could have afforded the proper treatment. (2)"

Recently, the overall profits made by pharmaceutical companies have been uncovered, and the numbers are staggering. These companies are easily making a ten times what their research and development costs were. In many cases pharmaceutical companies have stated that they sometimes cannot recover their research costs in the seventeen years they are given. As investigators have looked into many companies' records, it turns out that this is far from being true. According to Rebecca Warburton and her article Research Costs Much Lower than Drug Companies Claim from PNHP.com "Net Median Costs per Drug are $13 to $204 million, not $1.3 billion" (1) as the pharmaceutical drug companies have claimed in the past. A billion dollars is the amount that these companies are attaining and claiming to break even on their research and development costs. In reality when they are hitting the one billion mark, they have already made somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred million dollars in profit. If a drug costs on the high side of three hundred million dollars, then the pharmaceutical company should only be allowed to collect six hundred million in sales; three hundred for their research and another three hundred to develop more drugs. This could be attained in about eight years or less for most pharmaceutical companies.

Another problem with pharmaceutical patent laws the way they are now is that they are littered with loopholes. After the original seventeen year patent is over, there are several ways that these companies can extend them for years. Barbara Sibbald wrote in her article, Drug Patent Protection: How Long is Long Enough? from the Canadian Medical Association Journal "After receiving the initial patent, (the CDMA says), brand-name manufacturers can add more patents for changes in coatings or other advances, and each one can add years to the market monopoly."(2). More loopholes are exposed by Matthew Herper in his article Solving the Drug Patent Problem from Forbes "Big (pharmaceutical companies) biggest loophole: When a generic drug is challenged in court, the FDA is forced by law to freeze its approval for 30 months unless the case is settled before that" (1). With these being two of many loopholes patents will almost always last longer than they are supposed to. In that amount of time people will either suffer or die from diseases that the drugs are supposed to help.

The opposition to pharmaceutical patent reform believes that the pharmaceutical patent law should not be interfered with or should be longer. The logic behind these beliefs is that the more profit that these companies make the more medical breakthroughs they will be able to fund. The result of the profits made is a better future with better medicine for future generations. Matthew Herper writes about modifying patent lengths in his article, "Such patent shenanigans slow medical innovation" (1). Herper writes about modifying patent laws in ways that will give the pharmaceutical companies more time to collect profit. He believes that the company's patent should start after the FDA approved the drug, instead of before. As a result pharmaceutical companies will have longer