Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer vs develop. So, without patents their would be zero incentive for private drug R&D funding.
It's very clear that patents are required by the drug industry before they will invest in Research or as often happens buy companies that have done research.
Now, if we give up all private R&D we could still manufacture existing drugs at much lower prices. But, turning over all drug research to non for profits and governments is a very steep price to pay.
PS: Ok their are some game theory based approaches where small countries could benefit from abolishing drug patents while benefiting from other countries research. But, that does not scale worldwide.
FWIW, we will probably need to figure out an effective way to fund non-commercial drug research anyway, since pharmaceutical companies are really only interested in certain classes of drugs (mostly drugs that treat symptoms of chronic conditions, rather than drugs which permanently solve diseases or drugs which treat short lived conditions).
I’m very open to being wrong here, but for the specific example of CAR-T, Wikipedia mentions that it was initially developed by researchers at a university in Israel. So not the pharmaceutical industry.
UPenn and Novartis brought Kymriah to market and Kite brought Yescarta to market. Universities can be great for discovery and sponsored research, but they are not leading the work needed to get to market and they are certainly not funding it. Universities efforts are the visible tip of the iceberg, pharma efforts are the bulk under the surface.
Thanks for the info. My comment was mostly coming from a place of having read articles like this about how antibiotics don’t really make money for pharmaceutics companies:
I see where you're coming from now. ABX (antibiotics) are a bit unique. New ABX are sparingly profitable because they are usually incremental developments instead of new classes of compounds. A new class would be lucrative. I see this as a reflection that ABX dev is a ridiculously hard problem with many failures. There are many working in this area, but not much to show yet.
Although Novartis and Kite brought them to market, aren't - from what I've read in several papers (correct me if I'm mistaken) - the vast majority of clinical trials in this area still publicly funded? (NIH/NCI grants)
Public funds are used up to proof of concept and sometimes early tox/CMC (often through a CRO), but the bulk of the funding for trials comes from industry.
It's very clear that patents are required by the drug industry before they will invest in Research or as often happens buy companies that have done research.
Now, if we give up all private R&D we could still manufacture existing drugs at much lower prices. But, turning over all drug research to non for profits and governments is a very steep price to pay.
PS: Ok their are some game theory based approaches where small countries could benefit from abolishing drug patents while benefiting from other countries research. But, that does not scale worldwide.