--- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If there were no patents companies would still make > drugs. You know why? > Because it just _so_ easy for their competitors to > snap their fingers > and develop the same products without knowing how > the original company > made it, what steps were involved what technology > was required. I mean > come on it's just so easy that I could write an > emulator for the PS2 in > ten minutes and have it never fail, it is just so > easy to figure these > things out.
This is nonsense. Eli Lilly spent almost $1BB taking Prozac from nothing to molecule to market. Do you know how much Lilly makes off Prozac in the US right now? Essentially nothing. Not even a rounding error. Lilly lost most of its Prozac market share in _weeks_ after the drug went off patent. Not years, weeks. Most drugs are not that hard to manufacture. The handful that are, sure, they don't have to worry about competition much. But most are trivial to duplicate. The cost in producing drugs is, first, in finding the molecule, and, second (overwhelmingly) in taking the drugs from molecule through Stage III clinical trials and FDA approval. On average that process takes _9 years_. That process only has to be done once. Afterwards generic manufacturers can duplicate the drug, run equivalence trials (very small trials designed to prove that their formulation is equivalent to the patented version) and wait to release the drug. How, exactly, do you expect a company to make back the billion dollars it spends taking a drug to market without a patent term? Even more so, how do you expect them to do that when 80% of drugs lose money? If there were no patent, the generic manufacturers would arrive with their version of the drug almost simultaneously with the original. The core reason that American drug prices are so high is free riding by the Europeans, who pay very low prices for pharmaceuticals but get the benefit of American and Japanese consumers paying for all the R&D. Take that away and the situation for American and Japanese consumers would improve a great deal. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
