December 25, 2019
The New York Times had an interesting piece about how developers of antibiotics are finding it impossible to make a profit, which most abandoning the field or going bankrupt. Incredibly, no one the piece talked with seems to have thought of a solution that does not rely on government-granted patent monopolies as the main financing mechanism for research.
“Public health experts say the crisis calls for government intervention. Among the ideas that have wide backing are increased reimbursements for new antibiotics, federal funding to stockpile drugs effective against resistant germs and financial incentives that would offer much needed aid to start-ups and lure back the pharmaceutical giants.”
The possibility that is excluded here is simply having the government pay for the development of new antibiotics up front, under contract, as it already does now with more than $40 billion in research that goes though the National Institutes of Health and other public agencies. If this funding mechanism were used all new antibiotics would be cheap, since they would be available as generics from the day they were approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (The piece tells us that the industry charges up to $2,000 per prescription for some of the new antibiotics.)
If the government was directly financing the research, as opposed to indirectly through patent monopolies, it could also require that all research be fully public as soon as practical. This would mean posting findings on the Internet as soon as practical, as was done with the Human Genome Project. This would allow the science to advance more quickly.
People should not die because we rely on the antiquated patent system as our main mechanism for financing the development of new drugs. I talk about this issue more in chapter 5 of Rigged (it’s free). Maybe we will see some new thinking in the new decade.
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