People love to cite drugs as being a case where patents work well. But patents are far from a perfect fit for this problem.
Among other reasons, in an industry that is entirely dependent upon patent protection to defray the costs of getting FDA approval, it is impossible to get treatments through the approval process when they are not covered by patent.
For example somewhere on the order of half a million people in North America have Crohn's disease. This is a rather nasty sickness that destroys quality of life, and requires lots of rounds of only marginally effective medication. Research indicates that hookworm infection is an effective treatment. The FDA has decided that this treatment requires their approval. But you can't patent hookworms, and therefore nobody will pay for the necessary tests to get FDA approval. And so a half-million people continue to suffer.
If the rules were changed to grant a temporary monopoly to the company that got FDA approval for a treatment, this problem would vanish. A number of known treatments would go through trials and get approved.
> People love to cite drugs as being a case where patents work well. But patents are far from a perfect fit for this problem.
Bringing drugs in the discussion has more of a relative role than any absolute metric though. We could subsume the reasoning as such though:
- patents work better on drugs than on software by leaps and bounds
- patents are far from a perfect fit for drugs
- it follows that software patents are an atrocity of abysmal scale
Sure you can patent hookworm therapy! You can't get a composition of matter patent, but you can get a use patent. There is a company right now running clinical trials on a similar therapy.
And if you did get it approved, and managed to sell the treatment to everyone in the USA who has Crohn's disease, you'd need to make a profit of several hundred dollars/person just to pay for the cost of FDA approval. Realistically you'd want to charge more to recover up front risks, the cost of marketing, and uncertainty about what fraction of the target population you'd successfully sell to.
Among other reasons, in an industry that is entirely dependent upon patent protection to defray the costs of getting FDA approval, it is impossible to get treatments through the approval process when they are not covered by patent.
For example somewhere on the order of half a million people in North America have Crohn's disease. This is a rather nasty sickness that destroys quality of life, and requires lots of rounds of only marginally effective medication. Research indicates that hookworm infection is an effective treatment. The FDA has decided that this treatment requires their approval. But you can't patent hookworms, and therefore nobody will pay for the necessary tests to get FDA approval. And so a half-million people continue to suffer.
If the rules were changed to grant a temporary monopoly to the company that got FDA approval for a treatment, this problem would vanish. A number of known treatments would go through trials and get approved.