By: Arzoo Zaheer
Date: May-15-08
I just read this article on Forbes.com and thought to review it.
Why Cheap Effective Drugs Go UnUsed?
Matthew Herper, 05.31.02, 12:48 PM ETNEW YORK – A large, multinational clinical trial has shown that an old, very cheap medicine could save the lives of many pregnant women. This study stands apart from similar medical research because it was funded by the British Medical Research Council, a government agency, to study a medicine that had been around for years. In contrast, most large clinical trials are funded by drug companies in order to secure regulatory approval for new products.
Kindly read the rest of the article here.
After reading this article, I humbly brainstormed three ways corporate companies may be able to utilize that big pool of cheap, effective, old drugs that usually goes unused because these big companies don`t see any profit in investing in them.
The problem starts out when the patent expires. After the expiration of the patent, the corporate companies lose incentive to invest in the drug. In my opinion, this issue can be resolved in several ways. I will discuss three such methods.
First of all, the government should provide some incentive to the corporate companies to carry out the clinical research. For example, issue some research grant/bursary to cover the cost of running clinical trials on such drugs.
Another way would be to move the patent of the drug between companies. For example, let’s say a company makes drugs A to treat breast cancer. When its patent is expired, the government should hand over a new patent to a different company. The condition that the government would be allowed to do should be specified while issuing the patent. Perhaps, the legal way of doing so would be let the companies bid for the patent for the drug A. The company which wins the patent gets to develop/modify the drug as well as get the profit from selling it. This would ensure that any drug that is made would never join the pool of unstudied drugs.
Lastly, the government may enter enter into a “give and take” scenario with a corporate company. For example, let’s say the government says (to one of the corporate companies), if you do clinical trial on one of the unstudied drugs, then in return we would increase the duration of the patent for one of drugs (let’s say drug B) that your company designed. That way the corporate companies would get the profit from sales of drug B, while “re-discovering” one of the unused drugs. The patent should be extended so that the cost of running clinical trial on the unused drug as well as cost of producing and marketing drug B is covered and some profit is also produced.
In my opinion, the last method would be the easiest. Perhaps, owing to the complex dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, the conclusions I have drawn here might not work in real life. But then again, they just might….
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