I'm not anti- all patents. Let's say, for example, a pharma patent worked more like a trademark: if you aren't going to use it (or maybe, if you abuse it), you lose it. Then we wouldn't have to trust this one company's opinion on whether it is "commercially viable" or not.
Maybe that's a bad idea. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't work in medicine. I just doubt what we have now is the best of all possible worlds. Intellectual property laws are supposed to be a net benefit.
They complain about the cost of research, development, and approval... so why not migrate those aspects to state entities which are not beholden to a profit motive?
Drug manufacturing is a very different business than drug discovery. We bundle them together hoping that the profits in one will bankroll the massive loss risk in the other.
But it doesn't work-- we end up with situations like this-- drugs that don't cover their upfront R&D costs, and also issues with questionable market-oriented priorities (I tend to think of the galaxy of me-too erectile-dysfunction medications that hit the market almost immediately after Viagra)
If we shoved a bunch of research dollars into public labs and universities, they could manage research, development, and certification, with the goal to produce a non-patented product that the manufacturers can compete to produce at scale as cheaply and reliably as possible. If the up-front science is paid for, maybe that 1,000 patients are economically viable to produce the actual pills.
I'm not anti- all patents. Let's say, for example, a pharma patent worked more like a trademark: if you aren't going to use it (or maybe, if you abuse it), you lose it. Then we wouldn't have to trust this one company's opinion on whether it is "commercially viable" or not.
Maybe that's a bad idea. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't work in medicine. I just doubt what we have now is the best of all possible worlds. Intellectual property laws are supposed to be a net benefit.