[QUOTE]NEW DELHI (AP) — India's Supreme Court on Monday rejected drug maker Novartis AG's attempt to patent a new version of a cancer drug in a landmark decision that healthcare activists say ensures poor patients around the world will get continued access to cheap versions of lifesaving medicines.[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/01/india-novartis-drug-cancer/2041447/"]Source[/URL]
[QUOTE=NeoAznMan;40115761][URL="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/01/india-novartis-drug-cancer/2041447/"]Source[/URL][/QUOTE]
Fucking bravo. This is how courts should rule, this is how law should work. The patent system we've seen in the West is sort of fucked up.
[editline]1st April 2013[/editline]
I just hope this trend continues.
[editline]1st April 2013[/editline]
India may suffer some considerable corruption on a local government level, but the courts and parliament usually come through for the people.
fucking patenting medicine is the most shithole thing you can do
just imagine if jonas salk was an asshole and got a patent for the polio vaccine
Fuck medicine patents. They like to bullshit about high R&D costs but fail to mention that the majority of them are met by public money. There are some really disgusting practices that take place in the pharmaceutical industry with patents like slightly changing an effective medicine just so they can get another 20 year patent lock on it and justify continued inflated pricing by claiming the newly modified product is more effective. New Internationalist did a great article on it a while back, I'll try dig up a link.
[QUOTE=JustExtreme;40116344]Fuck medicine patents. They like to bullshit about high R&D costs but fail to mention that the majority of them are met by public money. There are some really disgusting practices that take place in the pharmaceutical industry with patents like slightly changing an effective medicine just so they can get another 20 year patent lock on it and justify continued inflated pricing by claiming the newly modified product is more effective. New Internationalist did a great article on it a while back, I'll try dig up a link.[/QUOTE]
If that is the case, then this is good, but if the losses for this come out of their r&d budget (either because of legitimate financial reasons or otherwise) then it is a very shortsighted move on the behalf of the campaigners.
Here is the article I mentioned from New Internationalist
[URL="http://i.imgur.com/2HrI2Ush.jpg"]Page 1[/URL]
[URL="http://i.imgur.com/ktroDcBh.jpg"]Page 2[/URL]
[URL="http://i.imgur.com/hT7dphz.jpg"]Page 3[/URL]
[URL="http://imgur.com/a/LtFqy#2HrI2Us"]Full Album[/URL]
What I feel to be an appropriate snippet -
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/iujOEPf.png[/IMG]
And then no more effective cancer drugs are developed, because now there is no money in it. Hope what you got was sufficient.
Deny a company the ability to profit from their work, no matter how ostensibly humanitarian, and they'll shift their focus to other areas. This may seem cruel, but it's how capitalism works. No for-profit corporation is going to fund cancer research out of the goodness of their hearts.
So they care more about the numbers than actual people, kinda sad really. Yay capitalism.
Let the market take care of it guys, it's fine
Just because it's the way the industry and the world works now doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Profits and surplus value aren't a right. Especially when people's lives are involved.
[QUOTE=catbarf;40117609]And then no more effective cancer drugs are developed, because now there is no money in it. Hope what you got was sufficient.
Deny a company the ability to profit from their work, no matter how ostensibly humanitarian, and they'll shift their focus to other areas. This may seem cruel, but it's how capitalism works. No for-profit corporation is going to fund cancer research out of the goodness of their hearts.[/QUOTE]
It's novartis' fault. They literally didn't change the ingredients of the drug enough for the court to consider it a new drug and therefore getting a new patent. They failed at using a tactic designed for patent hoarding.
[QUOTE=JustExtreme;40117756]So they care more about the numbers than actual people, kinda sad really. Yay capitalism.
Let the market take care of it guys, it's fine
Just because it's the way the industry and the world works now doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Profits and surplus value aren't a right. Especially when people's lives are involved.[/QUOTE]
Sure, there are alternatives. Government funding works, albeit slowly and inefficiently.
What I don't get are people who think that corporations shouldn't be able to profit from drug development, but still expect the drugs to be developed and will cry foul if the company abandons the line of research entirely. As with any other business, if there's no incentive, there's no work done.
[QUOTE=Rofl my Waff;40118516]It's novartis' fault. They literally didn't change the ingredients of the drug enough for the court to consider it a new drug and therefore getting a new patent. They failed at using a tactic designed for patent hoarding.[/QUOTE]
I'm curious, what do they stand to gain by patenting a very-slightly-altered drug? Not saying I disagree but I'm not seeing the motivation.
An additional 20 years of distributing it at their chosen inflated price without generics of it being allowed to be produced legitimately.
They'll often claim the new slightly modified drug is superior and skew the testing stats/present them in a way favourable to the new product when actually there is very little real tangible difference in effectiveness.
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